The Depressive Position and Middle Adolescence: Developmental and Therapeutic Considerations

There are many developmental theories that describe the psychological transformations that occur during adolescence, but most agree that the capacity for heterosexual intimacy is the primary psychological achievement of adolescence. In the psychoanalytic relationship, however, there are often tacit expectations of a therapeutic intimacy that do not correspond to the stage specific capacity for intimacy. Such errors stem from a fixed notion of intimacy that corresponds not to the younger adolescent's capacity for intimacy, but to the young adult's. When intimacy is conceptualized from the point of view of the development of relatedness, each stage of adolescence will be seen to bring its own distinct quality of intimacy. The early adolescent is intimate in a way that is different from the middle adolescent, which is again different from the more familiar intimacy of the late adolescent and young adult. This developmental sequence will be subsequently explored, with particular emphasis on the relational capacity of middle adolescence and the relevance of this to the therapeutics of middle adolescence.

While a description of social behaviors does not explain the capacity for relatedness, it is, of course, a manifestation of this capacity. Over the course of adolescence there are major shifts in the types of social behaviors that predominate at a given stage. In the earliest phase of adolescence, group relationships come to have special importance. Group membership affords a sense of belonging