Chapter 8. The Emergence from Adolescence

It is evident that psycho-analysts use the term “adolescent”, as they should use all technical terminology, in a metapsychological sense particularly to signify a global state of personality. While we understand it to be statistically related to the years following pubescence, we should not limit ourselves to a chronological vertex but rather to consider that, like any developmental organisation, adolescence is likely to persist until it is abandoned either by progression or by regression. When the regression is to a strongly pathological organisation of earlier development, the differentiation of these two outcomes may be very obvious, but when it is a return to a fairly well organised latency period as the status quo ante, the distinction between progress and regression may be lost to direct observation and only become apparent in the course of psychoanalytical work. This proves to be the case with many people who come to psycho-analysis for professional motives. It is too glib and disrespectful to write off these motives as rationalisations; the professional aspects, the admiration for psycho-analysis as a science, the wish to utilise its findings or to contribute to its development are often quite genuine. This is to be differentiated from the approach of people suffering from the disorders of pseudo-maturity to which I have referred elsewhere (1966), (1967) in which there is a serious impediment to adolescent development as the consequence of a spurious or even fraudulent approach to the adult world. In referring to people who regress to latency rather than progress to adult organisation, and in mentioning the covert quality of this step backwards, I imply no fraudulent motive, but only retreat to mechanisms by which peace was purchased earlier in the face of oedipal suffering, now resorted to again in the face of new suffering in the realm of sexuality.

I have indicated in Chapter 7 that the central turmoil in adolescence is one of confused identity related to