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This article addresses the issue of the use of psychoanalysis in the field of social work through the description of the running of “Thélémythe”, a special institution which, in partnership with child welfare, cares for adolescents in difficulty. It sketches a history of the institution as well as a few examples of the clinical work which can take place. The substantive theoretical issue hangs on how the possibility of child welfare, applied especially to adolescents and young adults, can be thought or rethought, at the same time as balancing out Freudian hypotheses and everything that psychoanalysis has brought to the childhood clinic, adolescence and psychoses.