In celebrating the 30th birthday of Déviance et Société, this paper discusses a lively epistemological debate on the objects of criminology that occurred 15 years ago between several outstanding contributors to the journal. This debate focuses on whether or not the opposition between the ontologizing paradigm of the “passage to the act” and the nominalist paradigm of the social reaction could be overcome. This paper underscores the contemporary stakes of this debate while considering the mental health field. In fact, it is in this field that a key factor is resurfacing: the temptation to resubstantialize deviance against the backdrop of identifying early behavioral disorders for predictive purposes, even if this means rejecting the advanced principles of the sociology of social reaction.