Panel Reports—The Psychology of Adolescence1

Maurice Friend introduced the panel with a definition of the term from Samuel Johnson's dictionary of the English language in 1785. It says there: "Adolescence is the age succeeding childhood and succeeded by puberty; more largely, that part of life in which the body had not yet reached its full perfection, " and a little further "The sons must have a tedious time of childhood and adolescence before they can either themselves assist their parents or encourage them with new hopes of posterity."

The "tedious time" is what we call the "psychological process of adaptation to the conditions of puberty."

The panel consisted of four papers and their respective discussions. They dealt with early, middle and late adolescence clinically and discussed each phase from a theoretical point of view. Leo A. Spiegel attempted to formulate a general theory of adolescence which formed a common basis for the succeeding papers and discussions. In "Comments on the Psychoanalytic Psychology of Adolescence, " Spiegel deals with adolescence as an epoch in personality development rather than with a study of individuals. His paper is so rich in ideas that only a few can be mentioned. The expectation expressed many years ago by Anna Freud, that the study of adolescence would yield information about the structure of the ego has hardly been fulfilled due to lack of detailed analytic information about this period of life. He emphasizes a point which Root made too, that it is of extreme importance to reconstruct the adolescent phase in every analysis. As a matter of fact, analysis has to be considered incomplete if the patient's adolescence is not thoroughly understood. Friend raised the question of why it is so difficult to deal with this phase of development both in the analysis of adults and during adolescence itself. Adults often shy away from examining and remembering their adolescence, because they still continue it or because they strenuously try to counteract it. But either way t