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

This is a valuable paper obviously based on a wealth of experience—personal, parental, psychiatric and psychoanalytic—of the phenomenology of adolescence from the points of view of both unconscious processes and social behavior. The authors have indicated implicitly, rather than explicitly, the extent of adolescent alienation, as a social structure, from the worlds of adult and of childhood. Also, they have captured the essential nature of the adolescent community, where everything is in flux.

Because of the fluidity of adolescent experience and fantasy, words are grasped desperately as concrete objects, as if the meaning of a word resided in its sound and spelling like a genie in a bottle. When this last resort of the omnipotence of thought begins to crumble in late adolescence, the stage is set for the metamorphosis from the chrysalis—or for deterioration. It is at this point that the mourning processes, which the authors rightly stress, commence, gain a grip on development, and impel the struggle for freedom from the adolescent enthrallment. In other words, I am suggesting that the title of this paper is misleading in that it understates its true importance. It is not a paper about “thinking” of “normal” and “psychopathic” individuals. Rather, it is about the crisis in late adolescence when “normal” thinking struggles with “psychopathic” ideas.

Again, what is implicit rather than explicit in this paper is the crucial loss of the primal splitting and idealization upon which the latency period relies once puberty commences. This erasure of

the differentiation between good and bad lies at the root of the psychopathiclike behavior of adolescents. While alienation from the adult world is complete, conflict between good and bad is experienced only externally. But with affectionate and stabilized sexual coupling, comes the parental urge which forces reinternalization of the conflict. It is at this point, at the climax of confusion between good and bad, that the great i