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Somatic expressions are a frequent reason for consultation in adolescent medicine. Three clinical illustrations of adolescents in pain will enable us to show the tension exerted on the separation-individuation process by the adolescent body, and how the adolescent and his family turn to the third party in care to help them gradually elaborate these somatic manifestations and get the separation-individuation process going again. The association, in these clinical vignettes, of somatic expressions with an eating disorder lends, in our view, additional weight to the question of the hindrance of the separation-individuation process, well described in anorexia nervosa; and, decentring ourselves further, it enables us to question the intimate and complex relations between soma and psyche, as well as the relationships, at an even more meta level, between medicine and psychiatry.