Aiming to investigate the historical conditions of the appearance of adolescence, the paper analyses Nicholas Ray's film Rebel without a cause. Regarding adolescent psychic operation, I think it is linked to the death of the childhood body. However, this does not coincide with the advent of puberty. It is necessary to weaken something that protects youth from the social injunction of inscribing a trait in culture, so that the pubescent turns into adolescent. The study hypothesis is that a weakening in the father function is the factor responsible for the constitution of adolescence. However, this hypothesis leaves a crucial problem: what cultural mutations does this weakening correspond to? It is with this perspective that it is interesting to look into the arising of the social category adolescence. In this article, such event is understood as an effect of the crisis of the disciplinary societies, in the mid-twentieth century.
adolescence; childhood body; father function; disciplinary society