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HOW DOES ADOLESCENCE BEGIN and how does it end? We can take puberty as a starting point because the psychological changes of adolescence have to be understood in relation to the biology of puberty. The changes in the body that accompany sexual development and reproductive maturity force a change in the image of the body with far-reaching psychological consequences. With the body changes comes an intensification in sexual and aggressive urges which have little alternative but to come into unwelcome connection with the infantile and incestuous objects. The ties to the infantile objects have to be loosened and shifted to someone in the peer generation. When the adolescent girl loosens the tie to her parents, she loses the support and organization she has drawn from having the parent's ego, ego ideal, and superego as auxiliaries to her own (Lampl-de Groot, 1960). In this vulnerable state the adolescent upheaval, which is necessary and even desirable for the deepenin of the personality and for eventual adult independence, is strongly influenced by the history of the childhood conflicts — how they were resolved, what propensity to regression remains and to which early fixation points — what favorite defenses were instituted against anxiety, what character traits were formed. In assessing adolescents, we must look, too, for their progressive, creative potential, their ability to find new solutions for both old and new problems.
How shall we formulate a psychoanalytic perspective on the end of adolescence and the transition from adolescent to