ABSTRACT
I stated in my introduction that child analysis had often been seen as the stepchild of psychoanalysis. Turning now to the adolescent phase of development, I can assert with similar justification that adolescent analysis is, so to speak, the stepchild of child analysis. In the early history of child analysis, the focus of child analysts’ attention, with very few exceptions, was on childhood, Anna Freud and her followers concentrating on the latency period and Melanie Klein and her school on very early childhood. 1 Adolescence, as a developmental phase fundamentally distinct from its predecessors and worthy of consideration in its own right, has been substantially neglected. As late as in 1957, Anna Freud was obliged to note that “in spite of partial advances, the position with regard to the analytic study of adolescence is not a happy one, and especially unsatisfactory when compared with that of early childhood” (Freud, A., 1958, p. 136f.). She too regrets and deplores the fact that “adolescence is a neglected period, a stepchild, where analytic thinking is concerned” (ibid., p. 137). At the same time she points out that, more than any other time of life, adolescence with its typical conflicts provides the analyst with instructive pictures of the
138interplay and sequence of internal danger, anxiety, defense activity, transitory or permanent symptom formation, and mental breakdown. [ibid., p. 140]
