The Initial Stage of Male Adolescence

Before taking up the subject matter of my presentation I shall stake out the conceptual dimensions within which my observations are to be formulated in psychoanalytic terms. This seems desirable because it relieves me of the constant reference to modulating notions of those issues which I shall discuss and places them once and for all into the context of a broad point of view. It should be made explicit at the outset that I conceive of "individual" and "environment" as complementary operational abstractions whose mutual influence on each other is a continuous process. Usually one side or the other of the total process, namely, either "social man" or "instinctual man," is described at crucial points of their intersection. The total process is best studied in terms of interaction systems or in terms of projective-introjective processes which find a documentation, as it were, within the ego or, to be specific, within the ego's object- and self-representational world.

I view adolescence in its broadest terms as the second individuation process, the first one having been completed toward the end of the third year of life with the attainment of object constancy. Both periods have in common the vulnerability of personality organization; furthermore, both periods have in common the urgency of changes in psychic structure in consonance with a maturational forward surge, and a specificity of deviant development (psychopathology) which embodies the respective failures at individuation. What was in infancy a "hatching from the symbiotic membrane to become an individuated toddler" (Mahler, 1963) becomes in adolescence the shedding of family dependencies, the loosening of infantile object ties in order to become a member of the adult world, of society at large. Putting this process into metapsychological terms, we would say that not until the close of adolescence do self and object representations