Page - 2 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

2 Introduction “Adolescence” is derived from the Latin word “adolescens”, which means growing up or towards; “adolescent” denotes the individual who is growing, i.e., the adolescent female or male. It encompasses the mental and emotional reactions to physical signs of puberty, including a particular transitory outlook from the world of the child to that of the sexually mature adult. The biological capacity to conceive and give birth to a baby poses completely different questions than does the emotional readiness to embark on an intimate, responsible relationship to a partner. It is difficult to draw a clear and general distinction between puberty and adolescence. Waddell writes: For in essential ways they (puberty and adolescence, GDW) are inextricable – the nature of adolescence and its course are organized around responses to the upheaval of puberty. Adolescence can be described, in narrow terms, as a complex adjustment on the child’s part to these major physical and emotional changes. This adjustment entails finding a new, and often hard -won, sense of oneself -in -the -world, in the wake of the disturbing latency attitudes and ways of functioning. (Waddell 2002, 140) Thus, puberty is a more limited concept than adolescence and refers to physical changes and maturing. The time range of adolescence has been defined variously. In the USA, adolescence is equated with the “teenager years”, from 13 through 19. In Europe, its time range is seen differently, from 16 to 24 years, with a dis- tinction drawn between early, middle and late adolescence (Zimbardo and Gerrig 2004, 449). The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines adolescence as the period between ages ten and twenty. Cultural and societal conditions are also of major significance here, both for the onset of physical changes and for the mental and emotional tasks of finding a place in the world. Only at the beginning of the 20th century did the term “adolescence” begin to be employed in academic or scientific discourse. G. Stanley Hall (1904) founded the sub -branch of psychological research into childhood and adolescence. He wrote: At no time of life is the love of excitement so strong as during the season of accelerated development of adolescence, which craves strong feelings and new sensations. (Hall 1904, Volume I, 368) This understanding of the turbulent “storm and stress” (the German Sturm und Drang) period became the object of intense discussion, and was questioned by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, since she could not detect this phase in other cultures (see also Arnett and Hughes 2012, 9–10). The developmental phase of adolescence long constituted a “neglected area” (A. Freud) in psychoanalysis. Anna Freud dubbed it Sturm und Drang in reference to a Romantic epoch of German literature.