You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr Helene Deutsch offers us a sagacious and compassionately insightful account of the travails of adolescence in the contemporary world. Her approach is larger than the customary analytic discussion of the intrapsychic and instinctual crises that every adolescent has to cope with. She examines the adolescent's predicament not only vis-à-vis himself but in the cultural climate that has reared him. 'In previous generations, and especially in European countries, "isms" used to arouse and direct the revolutionary spirit of the younger generation. There are no such inspiring "isms" in our society today and, as a consequence, the majority of contemporary youth in the United States have remained politically aloof. Their strivings and ambitions have therefore had an orientation that is much more personal than social.' Dr Deutsch draws upon her long clinical experience and her involvement with the conflictual realities of the young in her environment. Discussing the issues of uniqueness, immortality, sexual differentiation, etc., that haunt the adolescent's consciousness, Dr Deutsch remarks: 'As a protective measure against the anxieties of the juvenile "I", the "we" takes on the character of a counterphobic refuge.'
But Dr Deutsch considers the student revolt a positive step towards charting a more mature ideology for the young in a society that is uncertain of the values it compels upon its young. 'From the masquerade of identity of much of the previous decade there have emerged a good many individuals with social ideals and new groups, formed in the service of a definite ideology. The danger of military service, which hangs like a dark cloud over the most important developmental years of our youth, is indeed oppressive. Nevertheless, even granted that reactions to the threat of being drafted may have begun as personal fears, youth's protests against the war itself have increasingly taken on a more mature character. The attitude of students to the threatened abo