The author, believing that Bernfeld's term 'prolonged adolescence' has lost its psychological specificity, attempts to establish it as the name for a definite syndrome. It is a condition in which the adolescent crisis is maintained beyond the usual time in order to avoid progression and maturity, regression and psychosis, or repression and neurosis. Psychotherapy, by attacking the narcissistic defenses without 'deep' interpretations of content, mobilizes latent conflictual anxiety and may result in a push into maturity or at least into psychoanalysis. If the condition is not resolved by the mid-twenties, it merges with the narcissistic character disorders.