Observations of the Treatment of Adolescents

Although healthy persons communicate and enjoy communicating, the other fact is equally true, that each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound…. At the centre of each person is an incommunicado element…. The violation of the self-core, the alteration of the self's central elements by communication seeping through defences; for me this would be the sin against the self… The question is: How to be isolated without having to be insulated?’ (Winnicott, 1963, p. 187.)

Winnicott's theme of the individual as an isolate has particular importance for the study and treatment of adolescents, because the effort to preserve personal isolation seems to be particularly acute at adolescence. This may account for the difficulties often encountered in trying to treat them. From time to time the question is raised in discussion as to whether adolescents are analysable. My own experience suggests that orthodox reductive methods of analysis are usually ineffective because they reinforce resistances. My failure to use such methods effectively with adolescents and with some older patients, particularly artists, led me to reflect on the cause and character of these resistances.

In this paper I want to suggest that the preservation of personal isolation is critically allied to the search for identity, and for adolescents identity is the central problem. But I want further to suggest that adolescence as a psychological state is not confined to a particular age group, but is present whenever there arises a need to ‘make patent the latent self’ (Laing, 1961, p. 117) without disclosing oneself—that is, whenever identity becomes the crucial problem. This paradoxical state necessitates on the part of the patient the establishment of a personal way for communicating that does not violate the central core of his personality and it also requires on the part of the analyst the use of communication of an indirect kind that helps preserve