Surely, it will be said—and rightly—the analytic consulting-room, in its heat of infantile intimacy, is not the place to study the social behaviour of adolescents. But it can, through clarification of the internal processes—of motivation and expectation, identification and alienation—throw a special and unparalleled light upon social processes to aid the sociologist, educator, psychiatrist, and all those persons of the adult community whose task it is to preserve the boundaries of the adolescent world and foster the growth and development of those still held within its vortex.

Our times reveal more clearly than other historical periods the truth of the existence of an “adolescent world” as a social structure, the inhabitants of which are the happy-unhappy multitude caught betwixt the “unsettling” of their latency period and the “settling” into adult life, the perimeter of which may not unreasonably be defined, from the descriptive point of view, as the establishment of mating and child rearing. From the metapsychological point of