ABSTRACT
This book has described the stormy transition from childhood to adulthood, a transition set into motion by hormonal development. The great fear the people have of ending a phase of life is often unconscious, because it actualizes earlier experiences of separation. By describing everyday scenes, diary entries and statements of adolescents, the author attempted to render comprehensible the wide range of behavior in puberty and construct a link to theory. The goal of the author theoretical explications was to achieve a better understanding and reduce the fear elicited by the surprising transformations of adolescents but also to encourage attention on dangerous symptoms of withdrawal or self-harm. Numerous pessimistic reports about outsiders and violence can be relativized when the people look closely at the results of psychotherapeutic work with these adolescents. Case studies show how divergent the development of children from the same parents can be.
