ABSTRACT
Establishing an identity is a central task for adolescents—discovering who one is, finding a mind of one's own—an internal analogue to the room that Virginia Woolf designates as essential not only to the capacity to create, but to the possibility of "living in the presence of reality". It is also a characteristic of working with adolescents that any hopeful notion on the part of the analyst of a "happy-ever-after" state must be resisted. When the established identity is still so fragile, extra stress can at any moment precipitate the emergence—or rather, resurgence—of states of mind that we might wish, or have believed, to belong to the past. Wilfred Bion describes that thinking as a function that, initially, the mother's internal object performs for the baby—drawing on her capacity to experience her infant unconsciously as well as consciously. Central to Bion's contribution was the notion that the vicissitudes of embryonic thought lie at the heart of psychic development.
