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

This paper is especially noteworthy in that it seeks to apply the adaptive hypothesis from the Kleinian point of view to adolescence, something which to my knowledge has hitherto not been done. By stating that adolescents are confronted with the need to mourn their infantile bodies, identities, and objects, and that they go through enormous upheaval and resistance to this process, the authors are, perhaps unknowingly, likening the phases of adolescence to the infantile experience of the transition from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position, in which the infant is first called upon to abandon the magical protection of

primary narcissism and/or symbiosis for the more adaptable and realistic awareness of his vulnerable and impotent helplessness and dependency on his object. The authors hint that this process repeats itself in adolescence where again magical, narcissistic symbiosis must yield to reality, but now the fear of dependency on the object is replaced by one's need to adapt to a newer and higher reality task of mature and independent coping, before which the poor adolescent is as stymied as his infantile, depressive counterpart.

In short, I feel the authors are paralleling the work of Hartmann and Erikson insofar as they are invoking an adaptive hypothesis and an epigenetic unfolding of the identity crisis of adolescence and its solution through specific mourning of parts of self and of body and object representations. I find myself in essential agreement with their thesis. Mourning has been too little considered as an underlying factor in the phenomenon of normal change, whether in normal development, going through analysis, or the like. The process of change involves giving up a part of oneself which once was dear but now is no longer useful and therefore must be changed or discarded. Commitment in any stage necessitates disavowing or surrendering all but one of one's choices. One cannot have it both ways, the adolescent finds. However,