Difficult adolescent is a clinical category, defined by psychiatrists’ expertise and referred to psychoanalytical concepts. Since the end of the 1990s, it has been extensively used to describe a marginal population in public institutions managing youth deviancy in France. This success occurs against a backdrop of institutional reforms, converging towards politics of suffering and risk management.

Contributing to the anthropology of mental health, this communication provides comprehensive elements to this success.

Interconnected networks of 49 documents were analyzed using a genealogical method based on Foucault's late conceptions and Ian Hachking's works on constructivism.

Results have shown that the category of difficult adolescents found its ecological niche in the 1960s, revealing a moral tension in the use of constraint. At that time, the introduction of the psychoanalytical notions of transference and counter transference depicted a clear distinction with previous categories such as the “abnormals” or “maladjusted youth”. Since then, it has defined an ambiguous condition, suspended between the trouble of caregivers and the adolescents’ individual disorder. In addition, the extension of clinical expertise silences social issues, such as gender discriminations, ethnicity and access to employment.

The reforms of custodial treatments represented the initial conditions of detection for difficult adolescents, raising new problems of intractable individual and institutional linkage. Driving towards a biographical personalization, the category allows new forms of regulation in the use of institutional power.

The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.