ABSTRACT
The strangeness and lack of connection pervade the adolescent experiences, as James S. Rose suggests in the title of his paper: The hour of the stranger. The paper by Rose is an interesting and complex paper which pushes psychoanalysts' thinking in various directions. Rose explores the ways through which the adolescents discover their sexuality and, going deeper, he proposes several clinical vignettes. F. Tustin conceives the infant bisexuality as the primary integration between "hard" and "soft" associated initially to pleasure and displeasure. The reverberation of early experiences, at another level of the spiral, implies the challenge of coming to "own" his/her sexual body, in a growing body, and his/her own sexual awakenings, as Rose illustrates. In the second clinical vignette, psychoanalysts are told about similar symptoms of anxiety and insecurity in relationships with the opposite sex in a young woman sexually abused by his father when she was eight years old, and the subsequent separation of her parents.
