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Ideally, late adolescence is the time of the last spontaneous developmental consolidation and integration of the personality. In this restructuring of the psychic apparatus the ego gains in power and increases its influence on the id, superego, and ego ideal.
The inevitable moves toward love and work in the realistic world alter the balance between fantasy and reality in the mental life of the individual and make the conditions of pleasure gain more manifest to the adolescent himself. This awareness may become a motivation for treatment. The crises of late adolescence arise when the individual who has not been successful in breaking or loosening oedipal and preoedipal object cathexes is under pressure internally and externally to find a new object and to make self-defining commitments in the realistic world. The reliance of the older adolescent on the new object enables us to study the process by which he makes the transition from the increased narcissistic cathexis of the self so characteristic of earlier adolescence to the object cathexis required for the adult love relationship—a process which is discernible in analysis but which I believe