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A steady appreciation of adolescence as a significant arena for conflict and structure building has been slow in developing. Freud's startling discoveries surrounding infantile sexuality had the effect of relegating the impact of the adolescent phase to a recrudescence of oedipal and preoedipal conflicts. Although in his Three Essays he clearly explicated the monumental changes required of the developing
individual in response to puberty for the achievement of genital primacy, in most of his writing Freud does not portray adolescence as specifically pathogenic for adult pathology.
For the most part, such underestimation of the pathogenic significance of adolescence has persisted in analytic literature, perhaps because of a phenomenon noted by Anna Freud in 1958:1 generally, the period of adolescence is not fully recaptured in the transference experiences of adult analytic patients. The full affective recall of phase-appropriate, overwhelming, and profoundly moving adolescent experiences is not achieved. Concomitant phase-appropriate defenses of intellectualization and repression and isolation of affect have been cited as contributing to this failure to recapture adolescent emotional states. Perhaps just because these powerful feelings are not recaptured, their significance can be ignored in the analysis, and in the literature as well.
In cases where the adult patient does succeed in attaining a revivication of his adolescence in the transference, the analyst is hard pressed to deal with the patient's profound aggressive and derisive attitudes.2 Resultant countertransference avoidance can lead the analyst to unconsciously shy away from making a reconstruction of his patient's experience.
Still another factor might contribute to the slighting of adolescence as a significant phase for character formation: the prevalence of the reductionistic tendency in psychoanalytic thinking that what is experienced earliest in life must therefore have the most profound effect