Infantile Elements and Adult Strivings in Adolescent Sexuality1

When I came to write this paper I soon came to realise that its focus would have to be a much narrower one than the title allows. I also found that I was returning over and over again to analytic material from a fairly wide range of gifted adolescents who, as the world goes, were more than usually fortunate in their external circumstances, young people who from any external point of view might seem to have everything in their favour but who nevertheless seemed quite unable to enjoy their good fortune.

In all of them there existed a deep sense of unworthiness together with the quite opposite conviction of being special. There was evidence to suggest that they were regarded by one or both of their parents as special, and that they expected this treatment from the rest of the world although when it was forthcoming they could not use it to assuage their discontent. One could think of them as young people who were in the painful position of having to learn that their appearance, intelligence, emotional endowment, and social position were not evidence of innate superiority but gifts which had to be earned by carrying them and treating them as a responsibility. Difficulty in learning this showed itself clearly in their sexual attitudes and behaviour.

Defensive structures that had served them well in latency and had allowed them to have a successful and fairly untroubled development at that time, made them particularly vulnerable to the intense sexual drives and frustrations of adolescence. They tended to have difficulty in being one of the adolescent group and in using it to share experiences with peers, thereby working their way towards more adult relationships; they were impatient to leap right into the world of the grown-ups and to that “happy ever after” which is the young child's idea of marriage.

It is not possible or useful to try to present anything like a comprehensive summary of the many publications about adolescent sexuality. I shall confine