Clinical work in detention centers, with patients who are prone to destructiveness and delinquency, quickly brings the therapists face to face with a particular set of temporal issues. The immediacy of institutional responses to “the urgent need for subjectivation” sometimes imprisons these adolescents in harmful repetitions of the passage to the act. The clinician’s creativity then becomes a critical first response in making these places into possible transitional spaces.

Adolescence, 2020, 38, 1, 119-133.