In this article, the author examines the discursive register of adversity summoned by some adolescents in the encounter with the other. This inquiry opens to the importance of the dialectic of the unfinished and the absolute. It furthermore insists on the recognition of this adversity within the therapeutic framework with its particular stakes. It is particularly important not to automatically interpret adolescent adversity as a refusal of psychical work, but rather to recognize it as an expression of an underlying therapeutic request to work at a tolerable distance.

Adolescence, 2016, 34, 2, 419-433.