[The vicissitudes of the therapeutic alliance or going from childhood to adolescence during psychotherapy].

By tracking the modifications of the therapeutic alliance between a pre-adolescent boy and his therapist, the author attempts 1/to describe the differences in terms of techniques and goals between low frequency session therapies and intensive therapies, and 2/to outline some of the characteristics of the psychic functioning of this age. In this particular case going form the first demand to the desire to end therapy, from sessions given on demand to more regular sessions, the transference evolved from a narcissic type to an oedipal type, heterosexual and homosexual. Some typical conflict of the age has emerged: mourning of childhood and anticipation of adolescence in its physical, relational and psychic implications. In elaborating this temporal dimension, the child develops, with the decline of the Oedipus complex, a cathexis of a personal historical space. This cathexis is a crucial process and facilitates the going through adolescence.