After talking about the growing rift between child psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the author recalls the models (medical, psychopathological, and child psychiatric) we use to conceptualize mental disorders in children and adolescents. He then examines the nature of diagnostic types (descriptive, etiological, and structural) within the major international classifications. The concept of school phobia calls for a structural diagnosis, while that of school refusal is purely descriptive.

Adolescence, 2026, 44, 2, 247-256.