The Psychotemporal Adaptation of Late Adolescence

Concerned as it is with potentialities, goals, and aspirations to be achieved, it is from the future that the superego views the individual. The self measures itself by that discrepancy between the present self and the self to be actualized. To the extent to which the future self can be anticipated will the ego feel contentment, self-loathing, guilt, or helplessness. From this it would follow that the future could be experienced in the present with hope or anxiety or depression and that emphasis or denial of the future might be correspondingly influenced. If the ego is conceived as developing and maturing into a more and more differentiated organization and organizer, the superego is that further differentiation, that projected plan for a supralevel of the hierarchical and composite organization of the ego. Insofar as one can convey some sense of himself as having been, now being, and where one hopes to be, one is testifying to the strength of the ego that could bring the self to this point of higher level differentiation and integration and to the experience of duration. Psychic time, if operating as an active principle to demarcate past, present, and future, as the ego differentiated primary and secondary cognition, will be able to cut through—in the sense of differentiate—affectively determined associations so that early childhood experience is not equivalent to experience at 19, though a strong resonance might have been evoked. The location of cultural experience (Winnicott, 1967) is both in time and space, and a sense of one's own history is the achievement

of a beachhead in the differentiation of inner self and outer self. It will be this relatively stable principle of arrangement, an issue of the temporal mode of the superego, that contributes as a variable in the capacity of the late adolescent to withstand regression to a nonanalyzable transference. A sense of one's own history is a gauge of this psychotemporal adaptation.