ABSTRACT
Given the history of studies in adolescent psychiatry for approximately the past 50 years, it would be immodest to try to encompass what has become a vast territory, mapped out in terms of the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, and epidemiology. Each of these gives a different picture, like the classical blind men feeling their way around the elephant. So I will fudge the task and try to summarize a personal thread of thought which borrows eclectically from all these fields, without my pretending to complete scholarship in any of them.
