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Social awareness of adolescence as a specific developmental stage between childhood and adulthood appeared (in the West) only at the end of the eighteenth century, following the establishment of compulsory military service, according to Philippe Ariès, the historian of family life. Anthropological studies in the 1930's and '40's have revealed that in preindustrial societies such awareness is still lacking, although the rites of passage, common to all societies and designed to permit the pubertal child to resolve identity conflicts and accept procreative roles, point to the cultural recognition of the significance of pubertal maturation. Using Kafka's Metamorphosis as her central metaphor, Annie Birraux attempts to go beyond what she calls the "banalization" of adolescence by current sociologizing, in order to "rediscover the adolescent … in his intimacy and his dealing with his own pubertal body" (p. 13). The notion itself of adolescence, the author maintains, contains profound and defining bodily changes. Any theoretical approach to this age period must center around the body as it exists and functions in physical and symbolic space and as it experiences desire.
Adolescence is both a specific period, the psychological and sociocultural period of puberty, and a process, that of the psychic integration of the changes introduced in the body by puberty. The sexual body of the adolescent, continuously changing in its external forms and internal representations, becomes the site of "a dialectic between the child's body, known and fantasied … and the unknown, mysterious, sexually mature body of the adolescent …" (p. 17).
Birraux, in her psychoanalytic perspective, not exhaustive but a fitting perspective with which to approach the internal process of adolescence, as she says, is firmly anchored in a "classic" structuraldrive defense model of the mind. She has a strong developmental bias, in that she stresses repeatedly the profound changes in the personality organizat