ABSTRACT
The emotional problems of late adolescence and the college years are basi cally no different from those of younger or older persons, despite the fact that the presenting symptoms are at times difficult to understand. The same unconscious dynamics occur at fifteen or at twenty-five years of age. The depressions of adolescence have essentially similar psychodynamics as depressions in middle age. Both are the result of loss, helpless dependency, and repressed rage. Disturbances of interpersonal relationships, psychic conflict, guilt, anxiety, and attempts to cope through mechanisms of de fense are relatively constant in any given culture, despite age, and tend to be more alike than different. If this were not the case, every psychiatrist would have to learn a new psychodynamics and psychopathology for each epoch of personality development, of which young adulthood is but a fiveor six-year span.
