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At the clinical level, more or less extensive limitations or distortions of the process of subjectivation (in general terms, the progressive acquisition of the capacity to know oneself as a subject, agent of impulses, fantasies, affective states and personal thoughts, and to recognise others also as subjects) are present in variety of pathological contexts. They appear above all in two types of psychic functioning: those characterised by de-cathexis of the object (autistic or schizoid functioning, narcissistic patients) and those characterised by an intense use of splitting and projective mechanisms (above all borderline personality organisations).
According to Cahn (1998), narcissistic disturbances and borderline organisations in adulthood result from an incomplete process of adolescent subjectivation. This thesis is shared by Novelletto (1984), according to whom such incompleteness almost always presupposes an original difficulty in differentiating between the I and the Other, an outcome of deficiencies experienced in the primary relations, above all those concerning the fundamental maternal functions of mirroring, word-bearer and anti-stimulus barrier. These primary deficiencies produce narcissistic flaws which, becoming reactivated in adolescence, interfere with the developmental function of adolescence and produce stagnation or interruptions in the process of subjective appropriation of reality, starting with that of one's own sexed body.
The idea I shall develop in this paper is that the analysis in adulthood of adolescent problems in the new posteriority offered by current analytic experience constitutes an essential condition for the reopening of a stranded or truncated process: a second opportunity which can bring to completion what it has not been possible to work through during adolescence.
It seems to me that, although adolescence today constitutes one of the most frequently travelled paths in psychoanalytic research, the adolescent dimension is still somew