The social withdrawal of youths, called hikikomori and studied Japan since the 1990s has received little attention from researchers and clinicians in other countries. Using Deleuze and Agamben’s reading of Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener”, the author will attempt to define withdrawal as a “negative preference” that can be resolved through an overcoming of self in the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

Adolescence, 2015, 33, 3, 593-601.