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Although it has long remained in the shadow of the latency period and of adolescence in psychoanalytic literature, contemporary preadolescence nevertheless seems to force the clinician to question his usual theoretical markers. In regard to the symptomatology we see more and more today, this period may well be one of the indicators of the effects of modern life. Through the perspective of the "question-enigma" of death and dying, as far as it is the object of cognitive readjustments imposed by access to concrete thought and hypothetical-deductive logic, we address current diverse expressions of troubled preadolescence: school phobias, oppositional behavior and rejection of authority, sleep disorders, psychomotor agitation, risky behavior, addictive object relations to new technologies, somatic complaints, etc.