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In keeping with the overall theme of the Congress, the special issues encountered in engaging the ‘psychic reality’ of adolescents were addressed. The Chairman provided a conceptual background, detailing the challenges posed to the analyst by the developmental circumstances of the adolescent—his fear of regression, his acute conflicts over nascent (or resurgent) sexual/incestuous wishes; his defensive tendency to externalise and his primary focus on the external world and the living present, rather than the childhood past. He pointed out that all of these factors interfered with the analytic focus on the transference, generally considered today the sine qua non of analytic work. Adolescents, particularly younger ones, were threatened by both sexual and dependent feelings towards the analyst, and thus tended to distance themselves to a degree that led some analysts to consider analytic work with adolescents impossible.
In order to counter these trends, said Jacobs ‘the analyst of the adolescent must not only be flexible, patient and imaginative … but must have the capacity to enter the world of the young person and to live with him or her in that world. By living in that world, that reality, we hope to gain access to another world, the psychic reality of the patient’. The analyst must also have the ability to relive his own adolescent experience, and to address his resistance to doing so where it arises—to maintain access, that is, to the ‘psychic reality’ of his own adolescent years. It was precisely this capacity of the two presenters (Aryan and Zeug), he asserted, that made their reports both fascinating and challenging accounts of the possibility of coming to grips with the inner world—the ‘psychic reality’—of at least some adolescents in analysis.
The first panellist, Marietta Zeug, then described her work with a 19-year-old man (A) who sought analysis because of the crippling effects of the persistent fantasy that he had been injured and was paralysed from the wa