Both the quest for meaning and creativity are amplified in adolescence. If meaning is a quest, what path leads to it? Is creativity a way to attain it? Should access to meaning be legitimately considered an essential aim of therapy (defined as a technique for establishing or restoring the normality)? If so, is it reasonable to conceive of creativity as a discipline that is essential for mobilizing adolescents and their caregivers?
This article deals with the relations that youths from urban housing projects and their families have with the law. The regulation of their lives by obscure and infra-legal norms interposes itself and relegates the official norm to the background. It becomes strange, threatening and inhospitable. So that the juvenile justice system must work with this widening gap if it is to avoid the risk of tipping into repressive violence.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7