But they can also be more liable in a legal sense. They can be held accountable for their actions, tried in adult courts, sent to prison or committed to institutions, made eligible for military service, etc. All these we might call social gestures, giving rise to an internal questioning. In the words of Julia Kristeva, a questioning of identifications, speech and symbolization. As we know, in adolescence there are oscillations in identifications with super-ego injunctions.
Peace can reign for a while until, seemingly without warning, all hell breaks loose.
Furthermore, identifications with ego-ideals are discarded as quickly and as strongly as they are taken up and defended. The adolescent's bodily changes, notable on an almost daily level, might even be described as an embodied form of detranslation, destructuration, destruction and fragmentation of the adolescent's sense of ego- integrity. The silent shriek of the Death Drive. All this takes place at a time when the adolescent is expected to conform more and more to societal imperatives. Certainly there are fundamental and necessary self-preservative aspects to these imperatives but we can note in the same breath an incideous element where the greatest demands for change are asked at the same moment that the subject is psychically his weakest.