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In his 2014 article, ‘Children who dare too much’, Fiorenzo Ranieri provides a compelling argument for how a child or adolescent seeks risk at extreme and addictive levels. Ranieri provides a solid outline for the ambivalent nature of risk. On the one hand, risk can be necessary for adolescent experimentation and psychological growth. On the other hand, it can be destructive and dangerous, taking on a more addictive form in what he calls ‘extreme risk seeking addiction’ or ‘ERSA’ (Ranieri 2010 and 2011). Checking the etymology of the word, I found that the Latin prefix for risk is ‘ri’, which means ‘to repeat’. The word first appears in French as risqué, and in Italian as risco, meaning to ‘run into danger’ or ‘danger’. Risk closely relates to the word ‘peril’, which in the original Greek denotes trial, attempt, and experience. Ranieri frames his article with this kind of binary tension.
He argues, ‘that the child introjects useful experiences in order to shape his/her own mental representations of risk’ (p. 174) as his main thesis. He also discusses earlier works with respect to how risk is an over-compensation for distress (citing Fenichel 1945) or an aspect of Mahler's ‘practising subphase’.