ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the idea that adolescent development in the "normal" young person involves successful mourning, while disturbed, or failed, adolescent development more closely resembles the process of melancholia. In the two troubled adolescents the author describes, the adolescent process has produced a "diseased" superego and crippling psychiatric compromises. In both cases the young person has failed, at the point of beginning treatment, to give up and mourn the parental attachments of childhood and has instead incorporated them into his and her final sexual organisation, or adult sexual identity. In relation to adolescence the author shows that the healthy adolescent demonstrates a capacity to mourn, and armed with this capacity she or he can move away from the dependent attachment to parental figures to independence and their own adult sexual identity and relationships.
