ABSTRACT
There was nothing of the later sense of adolescence as performing a major developmental task: that of providing a crucial period for the restructuring and final organization of the personality. The emphasis at this early stage was very much on adolescent sexuality, to be picked up again by Ernest Jones in a paper given in 1922, "Some Problems of Adolescence". This chapter describes the understanding of the infantile components of the adolescent psychic make-up. Something was astir, even then, in the psychoanalytic community, although it took a further fifty years before the import of this thinking properly came into its own. Anna Freud and Melanie Klein extended Freud's psychoanalytic work with disturbed adults into the realm of children—and, in Klein's case, very early childhood—and techniques emerged to access the inner world of the children's underlying experiences, drawing on Freud's theories of the unconscious, to understand the plight of the mental states of young children and adolescents.
