The Authors consider the intersubjective and intrapsychic dynamics going along with the transformations to the marriage bond with parenthood experience. The creation of parental bonds requires to renounce idealized mirroring and to re-elaborate the uncanny experience of third parties, starting with the founding origins of identity. When the tertiary processes are not sufficiently completed, the need for subjectivation and differentiation is transformed into the need for intersubjective separation. Under such circumstances, only the actual separation al-lows, after crossing phases of acute pain, to truly experience the Other, rebalancing the dialec-tic between Eros and Thànatos. This process is reactivated by the adolescent child’s puberty, mobilizing what has been removed or split in the current family and parental structures. In the institutional work with adolescent families, especially in the most difficult cases, the psychic groupality, activated by supervision and co-vision, represents an ineludible experience of thirdness. It activates the fundamental processes of the primary scene (Gaddini, 1974) which continuously repeating itself over time, allows the therapist to elaborate his position in front of the "disturbing" and parents to feel accompanied in crossing the pain of separation, intended as a transformational process and not as a disruption of their bond.
Keywords: Separation, thirdness, adolescent family, psychic groupality, institutional work.