Editorial

We have all been adolescents. We have all had to contend with bodies under the siege of inexorable physiological imperatives, whether these were welcome or resisted, and which delivered an adult morphology that we had little choice but to make our peace with. Neuroscience is rapidly teaching us that the changes within the brain are no less physical and no less seismic. If we used to think of adolescent transformation as a mostly linear affair, tadpoles to frogs – breaking out of the egg, gaining limbs, losing a tail – we must now understand that what occurs within the human brain during puberty is a much more complex process which has more in common with the metamorphosis of the caterpillar. A section through a pupating chrysalis reveals not order but apparent physiological chaos, in which all caterpillar (larval) body parts appear disintegrated and no butterfly (adult-imago) parts are revealed. It appears that during human adolescence ‘synaptic pruning’ and the forging of new neurological pathways may be of an analogous order and manifest radical physical alterations in how the brain functions. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the emotional and psychological maelstrom that may ensue, and even less surprised where there has also been a troubled start in life. There is of course a corresponding raft of external, social, changes going on for the adolescent too. Every settled productive adult has had to negotiate a change of role and expectations, take on new responsibilities, steer their own course, become autonomous, work out who they are attracted to and how to be sexually intimate. From a developmental perspective our work with adolescents might almost be understood as a kind of psychoanalytic midwifery: where a complex psychological ‘birth’ seems to be stuck or to be going awry, we may be called in to accompany, intervene, encourage in order to help the young adult be ‘born’, capable of independent, viable and sexual life.

So this issue on a special theme of a