Introduction

Puberty is a time of tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood. Adolescence encompasses the mental and emotional reactions to physical signs of puberty, including a particular transitory outlook from the world of the child to that of the sexually mature adult. It is difficult to draw a clear and general distinction between puberty and adolescence. Cultural and societal conditions are also of major significance, both for the onset of physical changes and for the mental and emotional tasks of finding a place in the world. The developmental phase of adolescence long constituted a "neglected area" in psychoanalysis. The difference among individual adolescents can be enormous: whereas in earlier phases development centers on more general tendencies, in adolescence individual characteristics come into relief, widening the divergence from one adolescent to another.