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The authors try to identify the links between two different situations of suffering in adolescence, interrogating the links between psyche and soma during this period. Two teenagers defend themselves against inertia that they see as dangerous: the first is affected by cancer and is suddenly faced with the amputation of her leg; the other fears a breakdown in her alcoholic mother and the intrusion of a perverted father. Both of them flirt with death, the first through somatic disorders, the second through repeated suicidal attempts. The authors’ goals are to establish conceptual links between two very different clinical contexts, which at first sight are radically opposed but may shed light on each other, and to bring out the possible relations between adolescence and death.