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The title of this article may be misleading. It is not adolescent sexuality that is the challenge. It is, rather, the traditional psychoanalytic concept of the place of adolescent coitus in psychosexual development that is meant to be challenged. It is a challenge, however, in the sense of inviting a fresh appraisal, not of a gauntlet flung down in disdainful provocation. The discussion will focus upon full heterosexual gratification rather than the myriad other forms that youthful sexual activity may assume.
There are many definitions of puberty and adolescence. The distinction I find most useful is to regard puberty as the pan-human biological spurt of maturation, occurring typically in the first half of the second decade of life, and resulting in procreative capacity. Adolescence is the psychological and social response to puberty, both in the individual youngster and in his cultural environment (Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry 1968). Puberty is essentially the same for every healthy human anywhere, whereas adolescence is infinitely variable. In this concept, adolescence has a biological onset, but a psychosocial offset or resolution.
Adolescence as we, the United States middle class, know it, is an invention of our industrial, technological culture, even though some form of psychosocial response to puberty is universal. The evolution of homo sapiens “invented” human neoteny and latency. That is, the disproportionate delay in sexual maturation is in the interest of longer childhood dependency, and affords the enormously increased learning possible to, and required of, the human, with his greatly enlarged cerebral cortex. In the development of that cerebral cortex, man achieved a unique and