This reflection relates to the passage between childhood and adolescence, and postulates that the experience of puberty troubles the defensive intellectual over-investment of the latency period. I suspect that in the gifted adolescent, giftedness, which is founded upon still-active infantile depression, does not enable construction of the psychical dams Freud speaks of; it is only a narcissistic show which collapses at the appearance of pubertary emergences.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°3, pp. 749-762.