A note on the crisis of adolescence: from disappointment to conquest

So much has been written and said about adolescence and adolescents ¹ in the last decade that I am somewhat afraid of producing a rehash of cliches, however apt some of them may be. Nevertheless, I should like to emphasize here the nonpathological aspect of the adolescent crisis by recalling the truism that adolescence is a time of psychic reorganization induced over a longer or shorter period (of course) by everything that paved the way for it—that is, by every aspect of infantile sexuality and the complex forms of cathexis that have taken place during childhood, as well as by the latency period.