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Based on clinical practice with female adolescents and young women, the author uses the prism of attacks on the body and their destinies to investigate the obstacles to constructing a gendered identity as a horizon of adolescence. The compulsion to attack the body, if it lessens in favour of a resumption of psychic auto-erotisms, seems to continue in a displaced form by the compulsion to rupture, particularly in relation to therapeutic treatments. This compulsion to rupture seems to disguise an unthinkable separation from the maternal object, revived and crystallised by the confusion between orgasm and the pleasure of bodily contact with the mother.