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EXPLORING ADOLESCENT DIFFICULTIES WITH A VIEW to possible therapeutic treatment involves attempting to engage a troubled, and often confused, individual in beginning to think, to think in a very specific and probably unfamiliar way. Beginning to think can itself be a frightening process. It necessitates learning about oneself. “They' all hate learning,” says the Psychoanalyst in Bion's (1979) final Memoir. “It makes them develop—swell up” (p.8)—pregnant, that is, with a new idea, a new birth/thought in the mind.
It is often at adolescence that the issue of different kinds of learning and thinking and their implications for development take on some kind of clarity. The emotional ferment stirred up by puberty and its complex aftermath is one that adolescents find themselves alarmingly, and often unexpectedly, caught up in. Inner conflicts and anxieties are aroused, which many seek to avoid, if at all possible. Some seem to stop thinking independently altogether and submerge themselves either in the shared mentality of group life, and/or in activities that are literally mindless, such as drugs, alcohol, or substance abuse. At the other extreme, some may try to rely on intelligence itself as a defense against facing and thinking about turbulent and often contradictory feelings—as a way of avoiding intimacy and evading engagement with “the agitation of inexperience” (Copley, 1993).