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Art therapy as part of the treatment plan for adolescents who are suffering from mental illness and are hospitalized enables “the processing of instinctual impulses, emotions and unresolved feelings.”In this study, the authors describe two clinical cases involving 15- and 16-year old adolescent girls hospitalized following suicide attempts. The authors present an art therapy approach in the context of a multidisciplinary treatment plan in a hospital setting. They explore the link between the unconscious and the therapeutic process. For the authors, art therapy is a tool to interrupt anti-creative behavior and the monotony of the unconscious process through a therapeutic process that enhances gradual “access to the symbolic.”These two case studies show how the art therapy process within a therapeutic framework can, in certain cases, lead to a traditional psychotherapeutic approach by proposing a real play area where the therapeutic process can take place, and how in other cases, the relational phenomena involved can block an authentic therapeutic process.The authors’ attitude when confronted with such archaic mechanisms or destructive acts consists of being alive and not being drawn into a world of pretence. In order to achieve this, they maintain it is necessary to bring together different therapeutic approaches (including art therapy) which are possible within a multidisciplinary team, since “.…the adolescent usually needs different spaces and a variety of practitioners in order to go through the different stages of this mental process”