At the age when many are beginning to venture outside their family, other adolescents, who are reclusive and have stopped going to school, adopt such a monkish attitude that they stay “cloistered” in their room. Unbeknownst to these youths, the religious register returns in different forms in their treatment. Their renunciation of sexuality and their refusal of the outside world, which they wish to ignore completely, fulfills an ideal of purity – which makes it difficult to form bonds, even therapeutic ones.

Adolescence, 2023, 41, 1, 155-165.