Adolescent Re-Enactment, Trauma and Reconstruction1

Ernest Jones, in his classical paper “Some Problems of Adolescence” (1922) speaks of the great changes that occur at the completion of adolescence and states, “At puberty a regression takes place in the direction of infancy,…and the person lives over again, though on another plane, the development he passed through in the first five years of his life”. Jones reasons that this is the key to many of the problems of adolescence “… it signifies that the individual recapitulates and expands in the second decennium of life the development he passed through during the first five years of life…” Moreover, Jones stresses that there is regression of “…other mental aspects than the purely sexual ones”. This paper was written before Freud introduced his structural theory in the “Ego and the Id” (1923). But I think we can nevertheless postulate that Jones already alluded to the regression of ego-functioning when he talked about those “other mental aspects”.

Adolescence has been for long the “step-child” of Psycho-analysis, as Anna Freud pointed out in 1958. Certainly, the names of such outstanding pioneers as Aichhorn, Bernfeld and Hoffer come to mind. But only over the last 20 years or so have psychoanalysts investigated the adolescent process more extensively, and its significance for the theory and practice of Psycho-analysis has become more evident.

Adolescence is a developmental phase, a process which has a definite beginning with the onset of biological puberty and the re-organisation of the sexual instinct, and ends when the maturational processes have consolidated into what we call adulthood. Adolescence, the age between, is a normative crisis situation. It requires the relinquishment of the attachment to primary object(s) and incestuous figures and the modification of reliance upon parental ego-support and the parentally influenced ego-ideal and super-ego. It is a process of adaptation to adulthood in respect of hetero-sexual object-find