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The chairman reminded the audience that adolescence has been viewed as a specific developmental phase for only a comparatively short time. Many analysts have contributed to this shift. Freud (1905) highlighted the extensive psychological changes brought about by puberty. ‘The adolescent's response to and resolution of the conflicts engendered by these changes determine the final sexual organisation’, the chairman said. Pathology in adolescence is often due to a premature foreclosure of the conflicts. Through psychoanalysis the young can ‘buy time’ to work them through.
Psychoanalysis of adolescents has its specific difficulties. It is taxing for the analyst to adjust to the adolescent's mental lability. Parents can provide gratification of infantile sexuality, undermining their child's motivation to give up and mourn relationships with the primary objects. The adolescent tends to engage in love objects, which detracts from his or her investing in the transference. Nevertheless, adolescent psychoanalysis is the treatment of choice in many cases of adolescent disturbance. The co-ordinator, who was responsible for putting together the Panel, remarked that the young person is locked between an unreachable, insoluble past and a frightening future. She compared his or her situation to that of Dante at the beginning of his journey, whereas the analyst may function as a guiding Virgil.
The first case was presented by Anita Schmukler. She wished to examine ‘an adolescent's response to her developing body’, summarised in the recurrent question, ‘Who am I?’ She also wanted to examine the consequences of these bodily changes for analytic technique. The pubertal girl often reacts to these changes with conflict. This can be seen especially in two areas. One is when the oedipal solution is affected by castration fantasies. Another is when the girl's view of herself as an emerging sexual woman is affected by an early conflation of vaginal and anal spheres.
Apart from these zo