Contrasting creativity and alienation in adolescent experience

Abstract

Study of general society and the adolescent population indicates that alienation, its components, variables, and consequences are common to both groups. Adolescent alienation is made more difficult, however, because, where the personal predisposition or the societal motivation for separation may exist, they are placed in conjunction with developmental patterns which of themselves necessitate intense involvement and work on the part of the individual. Thus, the adolescent, who under normal circumstances is in transition, when also alienated to the extreme experiences even greater discrepancy between his or her desired levels of interor intra-personal involvement. For this individual, the perception of a sense of powerlessness, the assessment of limited meaning in life, the development of a negative self-concept, the experience of isolation from one’s peers and larger community through variables that are difficult to grasp or change, all serve to increase the effects of an already fragile and liminal point in time. Clearly, this threshold provides opportunity as well as confusion. Wherever there are polarities, there are possibilities for equilibrium. Thus, inherent in this discussion is the assertion that discrepancy may be balanced through engagement and commitment; differentiation may be weighed against integration. From a sense of paralysis and fragmentation, the alienated individual may be brought to a greater sense of freedom and individuation. What abides within these implications of competence, engagement, intrinsic valuing, and communal integration is a sense of the untapped creative potential of the individual: that which simultaneously nurtures self and society. Review of literature on alienation yields a series of five commonly present factors: (a) powerlessness, (b) meaninglessness, (c) prevailing negative self-image, (d) cultural estrangement, and, most important and pervasive, (e) a sense of discrepancy between desire and reality (Estelle, 1986). The theme of powerlessness is found recurrently in the study of alienation. What separates one most completely from self and society is a sense of lack of control over the most personal aspects of one’s life. Rarely is this external perception given objective identity by the alienated; it holds a subjective, almost ominous ability to leave one impotent and unproductive. This diffuse impression of lack of personal power leads to a distrust of oneself and of one’s environment, which makes interactions limited and, in extreme cases, impossible. Meaninglessness correlates with the time perspective experienced by the alienated individual. Even for those who are chronologically mature, patent mistrust of adult values, decision-making capabilities, and affective modeling may lead to a vague longing for the past and an idealized fusion within the mother/child relationship (Keniston, 1965). This, combined with the sense of powerlessness, produces a distinct orientation to the present, to a denial of what the future might offer, and to a rejection of adulthood itself. For the alienated adolescent in particular, this type of orientation leads to an abandonment of hope and