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Analytic and social observation of adolescents over an extended period of time permit one to see alternating phases of chaos and consolidation. As the end of adolescence approaches, the wild swings of mood and interest, the geniuslike insights into personal and social problems, the egotism and altruism, the overpowering drives simmer down to respectable levels of intensity which now make the adolescent a comfortable person to deal with, either socially or in our particular sphere, analytically.
In some ways, this favorable and normal solution makes the impression of a reduction from multipotential to unipotential forces. Of the many possibilities of personality and intellectual outcomes only one may be partially realized. Here maturation consists in reduction of possibilities; to speak with Hartmann, in analysis (as well as outside of it) we assist at the "murder of talents."2
Behind this screen of order and disorder, of chaos and consolidation, lie a number of processes which we invoke more or less loosely, in order to perceive structure in the shifting scene of adolescence. These processes consist in the struggle to achieve genitality, the struggle to attain a nonincestuous object, the struggle to achieve a firm sense of self, and in the struggle to achieve a steady relation between the three psychic systems. These processes interact with and rebound on each other, producing multitudinous clinical echoes in ways too complicated to trace fully in a given adolescent. It is this fluid interaction