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Through the discourse of an adolescent girl, the author shows the difficulties of the encounter between the time of adolescence and the time of hospitalization in adolescent psychiatry. Admittedly, there is a legitimate fear of harming adolescents by creating an alienating dependency when suggesting the need for hospitalization, and the aim of any hospitalization in adolescence must always be to enable the restoration of physical and psychological capacities in order to bring about greater autonomy and subjective appropriation. The time of hospitalization must therefore allow for a dual approach to the adolescent and their environment, especially in situations where the mutual negative effects are self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing, dooming attempts at change to failure, thereby allowing the adolescent to take care of themselves through this immersion in a psychiatric hospital environment where they receive treatment. This orientation presupposes the possibility of internalizing the proposed model, so that the effect of hospitalization goes beyond the mere alleviation of acute symptoms. In order to achieve these aims, the concepts of the containing function and institutional therapy are revisited.