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The central idea in this paper is that the chief characterisation which allows us to identify adolescent states of mind is the sense of fluidity that accompanies the young person's experiments with identity. The author presents material from the analyses of four patients, varying in age from fifteen to forty, to illustrate his thesis that, ‘adolescence is as much a state of mind as a description of a particular age group’, and
that it is common to us all. He focuses on processes of splitting and projection which prevent contact between differing states of mind within one individual.
In the first clinical example the author describes a session with a teenage boy whose rage at being excluded from his parents' marriage is the basis for bitter attacks on the analyst. Each clinical example is followed by a discussion in which the major characteristics of adolescence are emphasised. Astor uses the next case to point out that his patient oscillates rapidly in mood from denigration to exultation. The expression of his physical identity-dishevelled and tramp-like—is incongruent with his emotional identity which, at times, appears quite feminine.
We are then offered the theoretical considerations underlying this case, with a quotation by Meltzer from Fordham's Explorations into the Self which explains how the self uses projective identification to gain or eliminate information about ‘real objects’. Astor explains also that Bion has described a primary functioning of mothering as ‘the establishing inside the child of a thinking object that gives meaning to experience’. In the absence of this function, emotional experience is discharged somatically.
The second patient is a middle-aged woman who has split off and projected on to her successful woman employer aspects of her own sexuality which she may then experience vicariously. As Astor says, ‘My patient feels dowdy and unglamorous; her employer seems … an exciting bitch attracting the most interesting dogs in the park’.
He uses