V. The Technique of Analysis in Puberty

TYPICAL analyses at the age of puberty differ in many essentials from analyses in the latency period. The impulses of the child are more powerful, the activity of his phantasy greater and his ego has other aims and another relation to reality. On the other hand there are strong points of similarity with the analysis of the small child, owing to the fact that at the age of puberty we once again meet with a greater dominance of the emotions and the unconscious and a much richer life of the imagination. Moreover, at this age manifestations of anxiety and affect are very much more acute than in the latency period, and are a kind of recrudescence of the liberations of anxiety which are so characteristic of small children.

But the efforts of the adolescent to ward off and modify his anxiety—a task which has all along been one of the main functions of the ego—are more successful than those of the small child. For he has developed his various interests and activities to a great extent with the object of mastering that anxiety, of over-compensating for it and of masking it from himself and from others. He achieves this in part by assuming the attitude of defiance and rebelliousness that is characteristic of puberty. This provides a great technical difficulty in analyses at puberty; for unless we very quickly gain access to the patient's anxiety and to those affects which he principally manifests in a defiant and negative attitude in the transference, it may very