ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the critical demands for the productive processing of internal and external reality in the individual life stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and senior hood. Young women and men in puberty show extremely sensitive reactions to the physical and psychological changes they are facing, but also to the challenges they are confronted with in their social and material environment. Adolescents are expected to live a creative and individual lifestyle in order to balance the enormous tensions between the potentials of independence in various life areas. Such a lifestyle seems to be possible especially if the life stage adolescence is not interpreted in a traditional way, as a transitional phase from childhood to complete adulthood, but as a life stage that is shaped independently and has a special quality. The life stage adolescence includes the period between puberty and the entrance into an independent professional and family life that can be equated with adulthood.
