The use of psychoactive substances in adolescence enables one to experiment with what the psyche cannot approach. For Max, a gifted boy, drug use is more than a need for freedom, it is a way of defining his identity and facing the violence of the pubertary process. His drug use has a mediating function that will come to be part of a therapeutic relationship, especially in his experience of limits and of writing as sublimation.

Adolescence, 2020, 38, 1, 39-50.