Recent Studies in Adolescent Psychiatry Introduction

Abstract

This special section is intended as a contribution to the burgeoning literature on adolescence and, in particular, to a growing reassessment of traditional concepts and traditional approaches that has recently emerged in the context of systematic research in an area long dominated by impressionistic and anecdotal reports. A major stimulus to this process of reevaluation has been the longitudinal study of normative adolescent populations by Offer (1969, 1975) and by Rutter and his associates (1976), among others. These studies have put into serious question the long-accepted notion of normal adolescent turmoil. This latter point of view was first enunciated around the turn of the century by Stanley Hall, one of the pioneers in the serious psychological study of adolescence. It became codified in the early psychoanalytic literature on adolescence and was most firmly and influentially enunciated in Anna Freud's classic paper on adolescence (1958), in which she advanced the view that adolescent turmoil is not only normative but desirable. In her opinion, the clinician would be well advised to look with serious question at an adolescent who did not show a significant amount of turmoil during this period, since it was likely that he would prove to be maturationally or developmentally immature, emotionally constricted or poorly differentiated. In a subsequent communication, Miss Freud (1969) spoke of adolescence as a disturbance. Peter BIos (1979), one of the most influential students of adolescent development, has essentially continued in this line, emphasizing in his discussions a normal, inevitable, and indeed desirable role in adolescent development for instinctual and ego regression. To some degree this idea of the necessity and inevitability of adolescent turmoil has been fostered by the ideas of Erik Erikson (1956), whose concept of a normative developmental crisis in adolescence around the consolidation of identity has been perverted into the