Using two clinical vignettes (one from an institutional therapeutic treatment, and the other from an individual treatment), the author investigates issues underlying the apparently “liberated” sexuality of two older adolescents: a tight, reciprocal clinging to the mother, in the absence of internalization of parental imagos that would enable true individuation. He calls attention to the psychopathological and therapeutic consequences of this.

Adolescence, 2019, 37, 1, 23-31.