This article attempts to analyze issues of the psychical functioning of adolescent delinquents sentenced to Educative Detention Centers. The paths taken, courses of action and emotional links are problematic for these youths who are compelled by their detention to accept being distanced from their figures of reference. To deal with this, should they let themselves be reduced to their acts or to the documents written about them ? Subjects of polysemic acts, they interpret in different ways their relations with their parents. The article is based on clinical interviews with thirty-six adolescents in detention. Work on the link will be necessary, and this work must be threefold, dealing with the family link, the peer-group link, and institutional links.
Adolescence, 2013, 30, 4, 857-868.