[White walls for black holes: essay on graffiti psychopathology].

Through a clinical case, the authors propose a psychological approach of tagging. The phenomenon that started in Harlem's black ghettos at the end of seventies and appeared in France less than ten years after, does not seem to be a simple sociological one, but seems to take place within the psychic economy of certain adolescents as an attempt to operate the necessary identity work to become an adult. Tagging as well as wandering can be considered adolescents' acting out behaviors and show the externalization of the psychic processes, thus proving a basic insecurity in their psychic space, invaded by anaclitic depression. Graffing, on the other hand, bears a resemblance to strolling in a psychopathologic approach, and already shows an attempt to become a person, and a quest of the Other.