The impact of cultural changes on the internal experience of the adolescent

Abstract

This paper examines the impact on adolescence of major cultural changes brought about by the advent of television, the combined threat of Nuclear War and Aids and changes in social values and family structures. The main thesis is that the volume and pace of these contemporary changes have an unsettling effect on internal experience and create conditions in society that replicate those that give rise to the development of narcissistic disturbance in early childhood development. Narcissism is seen as central in adolescence and inadequately modulated in the prevailing "culture of narcissism". An example is given of such disturbance in a young man. The relevance of psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and as an activity concerned with self and object relatedness is discussed, followed by an illustration of psychoanalysis in practice in a therapeutic community for adolescents, Peper Harow.