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In this paper, the author discusses the re-occurrence of infantile, protomental functioning in adolescence. She demonstrates, through a clinical example, how the past is presented (Bion) in the tendency to resort to bodily-centered and sensation-dominated protections that are reactivated when the internal and external, physical and psychological changes brought by puberty are felt to be potentially overwhelming when adequate mental and emotional development is stultified and sensation and action once again come to the aid when the adolescent’s way of attenuating anxieties unconsciously resonates with those unmentalized events of early infancy.