Using a clinical vignette, the authors revisit silence and the inhibition of psychical function in adolescents. They emphasize the work of the preconscious, which plays a major role in dealing with the excitations and genitality proper to the adolescent process, and try to articulate this with a theory of therapeutic technique with adolescents.
The author attempts to delineate the nature of the negative in the course of the building of the love object at adolescence. Resting on the concept of a negative narcissism revealing the alteration of the functional value of the object, numerous clinical examples are here described in order to illustrate such an object misery, i.e. situations in which the object love becomes significant of a reversal on oneself within hate and shame.