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The confusion which I described in lecture seven is such a prominent feature of human activity that we shall have to discuss the matter further. First, we must beware the danger of prematurely seeking a solution which would remove from discussion what may well be an essential feature of human mental activity. The discussion is not intended to terminate, but to illuminate the object of the discussion. As an analogy, it would be dangerous to substitute a portrait for the person portrayed.
The situation I want to describe, using the ordinary time-scale of weeks, months and years, is somewhere between the ages of sixteen or seventeen and twenty-three or twenty-four: Putting it in more pictorial and less mathematical terms, the period of adolescence. But the term ‘period’ falsifies the situation by simplifying it. I am trying to consider a state of mind which is in no way pathological, in no way diseased, and in no sense stable, although disease and pathological events may be a part of the ‘phase’ studied. I can imagine that a time may soon come when there will be no general psychoanalysts, only specialists in some particular aspect of psychoanalysis, such as particular phases to which particular psychoanalysts are appointed. But to use these categories and fail to observe that they are related to the limitations of the human mind, and not to the limits of the subject studied, contributes added confusion to the confused situation. This is particularly so when we have to study the human personality. Analogies taken from anatomy and physiology may illuminate, but cease to do so if their character is not observed.
There is no realization which approximates to the verbal description of this phase of turbulence. For example, in adolescence the turbulence occurs when the personality is still enough of a child to
remember what it feels like, and is already grown up enough to suspect what it feels like to be grown up. Although we do not show signs which are anything like the gr