The adolescent who risks getting lost in his own reflection or in that of others he bears is thus both on a quest for images and under the control of the past. Some forms of control are direct and quite obvious, others are parallel or lateral – among siblings, for example – or sometimes farther back in the ancestral line. Along with the question of an anthropology of adolescence, we propose to approach the quiet transformations inherent to adolescent processes and the insidious installation of figures that partly obscure the field of representation. We will try to show that though these figures sometimes set the subject in a dynamic of unending mourning, they will in the end contribute to structuration, and therefore have a positive influence on the adolescent process.

Adolescence, 2014, 32, 1, 57-70.