ABSTRACT
During the adolescent years there is a likelihood that to both good and bad ends, the projective tendencies will predominate over the introjective. The struggle towards an internal capacity for intimacy is what, in important ways, adolescence has been working towards all along. Developing such a capacity may take many more years and possibly several different attempts. In late adolescence the struggle for separation, one which is fundamental to this capacity to be one's own person, tends to take on certain characteristics which differ from the early teenage years. In late adolescence what becomes particularly evident is the way in which normal development is dependent on the mechanism for satisfying curiosity about the self (that is projective identification) being introjected in such a way as to foster an increase in thinking and in understanding. If this can happen in relation to figures in the external world, it can, as a result, also gradually happen with figures in the internal world.
