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In support groups working with adolescents, exchanges relate to representations of the opposite sex. The greater awareness that results leads to measuring the gap between what one perceives of the other, what one imagines around them and reality. Verbal elaboration opens out to encounter and exchange, confronting representations and reality. Focusing on the work by P. Aulagnier (L’Activité de Représentation) and poems by adolescents where unease and fear of the other hint strongly as avatars of desire, the author speculates as to how to integrate the other and their otherness into oneself. He proposes the hypothesis whereby one of the effects of becoming aware and drawing up representations of the opposite sex at adolescence is to fend off violence as given expression within the couple and the family. From this will ensue responsibility in accepting one’s role as subject of one’s own desire.