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I have reviewed the particular fit between denial and adolescent development and experience. Denial, in my view, directly involves some aspect of external reality, and indirectly also internal reality, and is made possible by a split in the ego. In the adolescent, the real attainment of adultlike possibilities creates an enormous conflict between the need and wish to exercise these new capacities, the anxiety aroused by them, and the fear of equally potent regressive childhood pulls. The adolescent, caught between his real strengths and weaknesses, tends to split his subjective experience, denying through action, gesture, or experience the more disturbing parts at the moment. Denial, in the adolescent contexts pursued here, is evidently closely linked with the developmental paradoxes and fundamental contradictions that make human functioning the complex phenomenon that it is. For the adolescent, denial may be used in the service of integration and forward developmental thrust, but also to achieve moratorium and mark time. It may sustain the adolescent's efforts toward separation from parental figures and standing alone, disavowing the anxieties engendered. But it may also represent the ultimate renunciation of autonomy, of the capacity to know the world in one's own way and on one's own terms. The most extreme form of the latter is found in the regressive relinquishment of the adolescent's capacity to know, passively resigning himself to a distorted and private view of reality, as is the case in the most severe adolescent psychotic pathologies. The correct assessment and handling of each case is the clinician's prerogative and predicament.