Discussion of Arminda Aberastury, Mauricio Knobel, and Gela Rosenthal's Article, Mourning as a Way to Maturity: Thinking in Normal and Psychopathic Adolescents

The authors are to be commended for their attempt at a provocative explanation of adolescent behavior, though I find little in their major premise which cannot be more logically or more validly explained from a different frame of reference.

In their major premise, the authors allege that the normal adolescent undergoes a mourning process for his infantile body, identity, and role, and for his childhood parents. They imply that this process of “mourning” is inherent in the adolescent and seems to exclude the multiplicity of variable and complex factors in the field in which the adolescent grows, which makes one adolescent so vastly different from another. Furthermore, they seem to virtually ignore the stages of development between infancy and adolescence. They treat adolescence as if it were a stage of emotional development, unrelated to the foregoing years, with the exception of the period of infancy. (I grant that there are also some general similarities in behavior among some adolescents.)

The authors apparently adhere to a thesis closely related to the thinking of the “Melanie Klein era,” with the utilization of such concepts as “projective identification” and the “omnipotent and frustrating breast” to help explain identity confusion. Melanie Klein's important contributions to psychoanalytic thinking are to be understood and respected, not for their scientific validity, but for their intuitive speculations and the profound effect these had in forcing psychoanalytic thinking to place greater emphasis upon the earliest years of human development. The authors can rightfully be expected to give a more lucid and more scientifically verifiable explanation than those explanations which applied to human behavior approximately a half-century ago, when they were more understandably acceptable, on a tentative basis, in view of

the youth of scientific psychoanalytic thinking. These obscure explanations are not acceptable today.

I would raise such questions as the following: