The account of three consultations concerning an arrogant teen-ager with a feeling of nullity enables us to consider the psychoanalytical process. Place is given to the psychoanalyst’s work of thought, about the emotional states of the subject that emerge in the treatment, but also those of the parents in the initial consultations. There is violence because of an attributive judgment coming from the parental objects in earliest childhood, which the adolescent unwittingly picks up, a fate that we regard as a clash between infancy and adolescence. We describe a concept – the distress of object – and reflect upon the feeling of nullity so frequent at this age.