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In writing this commentary on a lesser known, yet classic Hoxter paper, I found myself wondering about the origins of its title, ‘The experience of puberty’ and feeling how little these few words convey the clinical insight and riches within. ‘The experience of’ in the title, to my mind, gives an impression of a more static concept of adolescence with ‘puberty’ at the centre. The tumultuous transition and state of flux that is the adolescent period is anything but generic and fixed. Adolescence starts, in many ways, with the physical maturation and psychosexual advent of puberty, and yet once physical puberty is ‘over’, adolescent states of mind remain with us long after the chronological teenage years have passed.
The understanding that during puberty the rate and speed of physiological, neurological and physical changes are so rapid that they are only comparable to those that occur in the womb, is not new. These physical, hormonal and neurological changes carry with them psychological states, which demand expression through a maturing sexual body. The development of the sexual body, which for some can feel imposed, ushers in the resurgence of infantile anxieties and phantasies. When working with early adolescents in the consulting room as child and adolescent psychotherapists (CAPTs) we acutely see, and feel, the connections between the infantile drives and impulses, now needing to be newly negotiated and modified. In this paper, Hoxter seems to have found a way to convey, with sharp alertness, how the resurgence of the infantile feelings of her patients within a newly developing sexual body may be thought about and additionally addresses aspects of technique in the work.
In an informative and contemporary commentary on Hoxter's paper given by Bradley (2017) in this Journal, a brief account of the historical and cultural framework to the idea of puberty in Britian in the 1960s sets the scene for Hoxter's writing. Not only is Bradley's paper helpful in placing Hoxter