Marijuana Abuse, Transitional Experience, and the Borderline Adolescent

It is surprising that psychoanalysts have devoted so little attention to formulating the psychodynamics of marijuana abuse, given its relative frequency as a symptom in current treatment of young adults and adolescents, particularly those presenting with a borderline personality organization. This lack of consideration can be attributed to two major areas of confusion in psychoanalytic theory: the imprecision of the psychoanalytic model of drug abuse and the difficulties in formulating an adequate understanding of borderline pathology in adolescents (Sugarman et al., 1980).

This imprecision of the model for drug abuse is in turn owing to two further factors. First, the failure to consider the relationship between personality psychodynamics and drug of choice (Meissner, 1980). Yorke points out “…the majority of writers do not distinguish between addiction to different kinds of drugs, tending to treat them as identical and including alcoholism, too, as part of the same pathology—which may or may not be the case” (1970, p. 143). Addiction