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The modest, rather outdated title of this paper does scant justice to its brilliance and clinical depth. I am pleased that it is being drawn to the attention of clinicians working today because, having spoken to a number of psychotherapists from different generations, I have the impression that it is not as widely read as it should be, despite having been selected for the well-known collection of key papers from the Journal of Child Psychotherapy (Barrows, 2004). One possible explanation for this might be that ‘puberty’ now mainly refers to a physical event, used within a context of sexual education. This is far removed from its meaning in the paper where it is understood as a unique experience, an ‘external expression of the unconscious anxieties and conflicts aroused by pubertal sexual development’ (13 [p. 96]).
According to Hoxter, the onset of puberty is also a call to war, waged between adults and adolescents as an externalisation of oedipal rivalry. Now the paper was published in 1964, and it is interesting to consider the context in which she was writing. Following the popularity of the teddy boys in the 1950s and violent race riots in 1958, the early 1960s saw the emergence of two conflicting subcultures: mods and rockers. It is now difficult to imagine how in May 1964 the population was drawn into a melodrama (as the paper suggests) surrounding these opposing adolescent gangs, yet it is likely that anyone reading Hoxter’s paper at the time would have been well aware of these disturbances. Mods wore stylised suits, rode elaborately decorated Italian scooters and ‘adopted’ The Who, whilst rockers wore leathers, rode powerful motorbikes (without protective headgear) and listened to Elvis Presley! It is striking that this was a conflict played out in public between two adolescent factions. One possible explanation for the fury generated within the adult population is that it was rendered impotent, forced to watch passively, and to clear up the damage created by