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Is the bond between a mother and teenager of a different nature when that teenager is a delinquent ? In the present article, we introduce a study conducted with two groups of adolescents, one of 8 boys with a confirmed criminal record and the other being a control group of 10 high school students. Each teenager was interviewed once and were then asked to fill in a specially designed seven-page Family Apperception Test.It transpires from this study that the young offenders seemed to have internalised prohibitions in a defective manner and perceive maternal authority as being arbitrary and devoid of sense for them. The maternal image is seen by these adolescents as fragile, split and deformed, less secure, and the mother-son conflict more difficult to imagine. It should however be noted that only a limited number of teenagers were encountered and that the results obtained from this research should be confronted with those from other studies, even if they are consistent with theory.