ABSTRACT
If the reader is unfamiliar with attachment theory a review of attachment dynamics is provided in. In the 1970s, Offer and colleagues studied the longitudinal development of a cohort of fourteen to twenty-two year old middle class males and found three developmental pathways through adolescence described as continuous, surgent, and tumultuous patterns. The families of these adolescents tended to be intact, stable, and functional. The insecure transformational self may be grouped into the tumultuous growth category. These adolescents are the ones customarily described in the literature on the psychopathology of adolescence. The key here may be understood to be a greater capacity for resilience and adaptation in the secure attachment out of which follows the transformational self. It seems that the secure transformational self should be understood as developmental in nature in the sense of promoting healthy coping skills, fostering secondary process thinking with open metaphor, and, otherwise, facilitating adaptation.
