Pearl E’s Reviews > On Adolescence: Inside Stories > Status Update

They are now in the "deep end": able to give and take away life itself-to impregnate or to have babies, to harm or kill themselves, to inflict actual damage on others, on their parents, and on their surroundings. This new-found potency is both exhilarating and also absolutely terrifying.

There is, however, one crucial difference from actual early states of mind for post-pubertal children, and that is that as adolescents they do now possess the mental and physical ability to act on their feelings, urgings, and fantasies.

This may bear on why learning to walk can often be long resisted, as if, despite the extraordinary achievement, it feels too risky to lose, forever, being a crawling person. A degree of mourning as well as excitement must always accompany so major "a step' in life.

In short, all developmental transitions in life are coloured, defined, perhaps even determined, by early issues of love and loss, for each one involves losing, because leaving, the previous known self.

As I have suggested, two very significant determinants of the nature of this inner world include the quality of the original mother-baby relationship and, later, the way in which a third "term" is introduced into, and becomes part of, that first dyad.

All such losses are part of the fabric of life, of what it is to be human… They may, in good circumstances, ones where there is sufficient insight or support, be emotionally pro-cessed, indeed metabolized, so that they can become assimilated within the personality and, as a result, can actually contribute to the individual's emotional growth and development. But they leave their mark nonetheless.

Moreover, it must always be borne in mind how frequently a troubled adolescent is fielded as "the problem' when that problem actually lies in some other aspect of the family dynamics.

The girls, it will be noted, tended to do so against themselves, the boys against an external person or thing. The gender difference is already stark-the girls were preoccupied with intellectual pressure, depression, body image, lack of self-esteem, and separation anxiety taking the form of a fear of rejection.

This age has a general tendency either to "think' (in the narrow cognitive sense) too much, "in the mind alone", as W. B. Yeats put it, or to avoid really thinking at all, attempting to cope with painful experiences through a variety of what might be termed anti-thinking, action-orientated, or mindless modes.

Attacks of unwonted ferocity and contempt may occur unexpectedly, especially towards parents, and very often an alternative ideal is found elsewhere, perhaps in an older "child", or in a teacher, therapist