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In this paper I am primarily concerned with adolescence, "sce," not "nts"; that is, with an epoch in personality development. My emphasis on a period of time rather than on individuals is designed to focus the attention of all analysts on this period of life, not only those who actually analyze adolescents, for adolescence is too important to be left solely in the hands of those who deal with adolescents. It is curious that all analysts consider the study of infancy and childhood a necessary part of their psychoanalytic equipment, but a similar attitude does not prevail with regard to adolescence. As a result, our psychoanalytic knowledge of the period of twelve to twenty has remained rather static. More than twenty years ago Anna Freud (1936) wrote that we hope to gain as much knowledge of the ego from a study of adolescence as we have of the id from a study of childhood. We must merely remind ourselves of this statement to realize that this approach to ego psychology has been far from fully exploited.
While we all attempt to reconstruct the early development of our patients, how many consider it as much of a goal to do the same for the adolescence of the same patients? To what extent are we able to say that a patient entered his adolescence in a particular state and left it in this or that state and also to describe the intervening dynamic shifts? I do not believe that the task is a less formidable one than that for childhood. It is my impression that the resistances in the patient to such a reconstruction are in general great; amnesias, isolation of significant connections are prevalent, and it seems to me