ABSTRACT
Many psychoanalytic writers are pessimistic about the prospects of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with troubled adolescents and young adults (A. Freud, 1958; Panel, 1972; Geleerd, 1957; Eissler, 1958; Gitleson, 1948; Anthony, 1970; Winnicott, 1966). Anna Freud suggests that the emergence and the intensity of the adolescent’s sexual and aggressive drives lend ‘a new and threatening reality to (Oedipal and pre-Oedipal) fantasies which had seemed extinct but are, in fact, merely under repression’ (p. 268). Engaging in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis may be fiercely opposed by many troubled adolescents since it propels them into the kind of dependent relationship with a therapist from which they are trying to disengage in relation to their parents. In characteristic style Winnicott states, ‘There is only one cure for adolescence and this is the passage of time and the passing on of the adolescent into the adult state…We hold on, playing for time, instead of offering distractions or cures’ (Winnicott, 1966, P.79).
