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Recent interest in regressive aspects of the youth counter-culture has masked a less dramatic, but nonetheless important syndrome occurring among conventionally successful youth in the mainstream of society.
However, reports are increasing of intelligent, advantaged, high-achieving individuals in their late teens or early twenties seeking treatment with the incongruous complaint of apathy (Klerman, 1972). Even in the presence of outstanding personal success they have no sense of well-being or satisfaction. On close examination, their achievements are attained through occasional outbursts of energy. They appear to be at their best under pressure, when they work or study with intensity, zest and brilliance. But these peaks are short-lived, and are interspersed with flat periods of dissatisfaction and boredom in which they search restlessly for stimulation. In the social sphere this need for excitement may drive the individual into a wide range of interactions, but personal conquests quickly grow stale. Their facility with people masks real difficulty in sustaining relationships, as they drop one person after another to seek the challenge of new encounters.
Halleck (1969) describes this type as an 'unrelenting stylist', or 'ahistoric' youth whose elegantly rationalized demand for 'immediacy, relevance, social manoeuvrability, psychological-mindedness and dissent' covers a need for fresh excitement to counter depression. He points out that depressive symptoms in this group can be severe underneath their intellectual pose. Anthony (1972) goes further in citing surprising similarities between this depressive syndrome and the withdrawal into narcissistic self-absorption of involutional melancholia. Descriptively, there are intriguing similarities between mid-life depressions and those of Anthony's 'aged adolescents', but the parallel is not clear from the point of view of dynamics. The patients we have seen are primarily phallic characters (Reich, 1931); (Fenichel,