Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Young Adolescent

Anna Freud (1967) once described the psychoanalytic treatment of adolescents as a ‘hazardous venture from beginning to end, a venture in which the analyst has to meet resistances of unusual strength and variety’. She found that analytic procedures well established in relation to adults and children proved unproductive with adolescents. She discussed the difficulties of establishing a therapeutic alliance and of gaining access to internal experience through transference exploration. Characteristic defences which the adolescent uses to free himself from dependency on his parents—notably displacement of libido on to others outside the family (peers, leaders, parent substitutes), reversal of affect (of loving passive feelings into their opposites) and withdrawal of libido to the self —are redeployed in relationship to the therapist. The therapist is thus kept at a distance, and his enquiries seen as intrusive, potentially overwhelming and irrelevant to current and immediate concerns.

There are undoubtedly formidable tensions that reside in the relationship between the psychoanalytic psychotherapist and the adolescent, particularly the young adolescent aged between 12 and 16. The young adolescent is still caught in the mental and physical repercussions of puberty and preoccupied in the new excitements and fears of becoming an adult separate individual. He is in a state of transition and lives in a strange world of uncertainty and confusion—a world most adults have difficulty in recapturing or empathising with. Anna Freud (1967) defined adolescence as an ‘interruption of peaceful growth’; unlike