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ALTHOUGH FREUD (1905) published his case study of Dora in 1905, his analytic work with her took place in 1900. Thus, 1970 was the seventieth anniversary of the attempt to apply analytic treatment to adolescents. If Freud was not therapeutically successful, his insights from the experience—those pertaining to the problems of transference, for example—constituted landmarks in the history of psychoanalysis.
In spite of these insights, theoretical questions and problems of analytic management of the adolescent patient exist today. In fact, some still doubt whether analysis is even possible during the height of the adolescent upheaval, the phase under discussion in this paper. Blos (1962) called this period of development adolescence proper, whereas Deutsch (1944) referred to it as mid-adolescence. Briefly, it is the moment of development when oedipal conflicts are revived, reworked, and more or less resolved. Incestuous ties to the parents are renounced, and there is a restructuring of all three parts of the psychic apparatus. The result is an expanded ego organization and a more flexible superego that accepts the new phase-specific drive derivative, genitality. The personality will complete its development in the later stages of adolescence