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As I re-read this rich and cogently argued paper, memories of my contact with Shirley Hoxter in the early 1980s surfaced – her strong presence, along with her depth and clarity of thought. My commentary aims both to contextualise and contemporise her thinking, according to my current position, both theoretically and technically, in psychoanalytic work with this patient age group.
Published 60 years ago it reads as a classic and contains much that remains relevant today. It was written and published in the 1960s when Beatlemania was a phenomenon and mini-skirts were the rage; there was a climate of liberation after the hardships and restrictions of the war years followed by the immediate post-war period. The birth control pill first became widely available in the UK in the 1960s. Much has happened in the intervening years, particularly the advent of the Internet and social media. Young people are exposed to ideal perfected body images in the digital world. I have observed much preoccupation, if not obsession, with the body in adolescents and young adults who turn increasingly to tattooing, repeated selfies, and other ways of enhancing and improving their esteem in relation to their bodies. Puberty is reported to occur earlier than before. Girls can begin to experience pubertal changes from 8 to 13 years; boys from 9 to 14 (Mannini et al., 2022).
Teenagers are experiencing, it seems, different forms of pressure these days. Twenge (2017), a researcher in the USA, has compared the experiences of adolescents of different generations, including the Boomers, the Millennials, then Generation X and now Generation Z or iGen. She argues that youngsters are taking their time to grow up and wonders whether parents are not launching their children into adulthood as before. A decline of interest in sexuality and dating in youngsters has been reported (Twenge, 2017). Interestingly, the film Inside Out 2 (Pixar, 2024) which was released in cinemas only this past summer, receiving the