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This article weaves links between three crucial subjects, childhood, adolescence and human rights, by studying the most problematic points between them and by reestablishing a dialectic between academic knowledge and civic involvement. Drawing on accounts derived from real situations, the author analyses the situation of children who disappeared during the dictatorships and that of street children, while discussing the question of psychic transmission between the generations as an agent of history and of psychic structuring and the construction of identity. In so doing, the author refers to the role of the analyst in this process, one that is different from that of social policy.