The Stepchild of Psychoanalysis, Adolescence

Abstract

Dr. Louise Kaplan contributes here her thoughts on “the stepchild” of psychoanalysis—adolescence, an area in which she is a specialist and which is the topic of one of her many books, Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood (1984). Originally delivered as the Anna Freud Commemorative Address for 1986 to the New York Freudian Society, Dr. Kaplan’s article builds on Anna Freud’s unique experience of the “intolerant” ego of the adolescent and is a contemporary reworking to which she brings her own original interpretation and experience. By using clinical examples, she shows how historical insights combine with contemporary therapeutic preoccupations and critical tensions to forge future directions in treatment of the sexual and moral transformations of adolescence.

The occasion of Anna Freud’s Centenary provides an opportunity to elucidate further a few ideas about that stepchild of psychoanalysis, adolescence. ¹ There is a decided tension between my own interpretations of adolescence and some of those of Anna Freud. However, as I began to review her papers on adolescence, it became clear that these tensions were also reflections of the expectable theoretical tensions between the ego and the id, the social and the biological, rational life and instinctual life, moral life and sexual life—tensions peculiar to and expressive of the richness of the psychoanalytic vision of the human mind. I know that it will be occurring to the reader that the classification—social, rational, moral, ego on the one side with the biological, instinctual, sexual, id on the other—while capturing something important about the way we think of the mental life, also overlooks other matters equally crucial to development and experience. These days, in theory at least, we always keep in mind the mutual influences of ego and id.

Even before he began to explore these mutualities, Heinz Hartmann (1964 [1934]) lamented those readings of psychoanalysis that portrayed the id as the representative of what was innate and biological and the ego as the outcome and agency of social, non-biological forces. The dangers of such dichotomization are twofold. During those eras when the biological is idealized, then, as Hartmann puts it, “we worship instinct and pour scorn on reason” (9). For the contrasting position, Hartmann cautions that the most rational attitude is not necessarily the most adaptive. The ego, with its synthesizing and organizing functions equips the human being with “a very highly differentiated organ of adaptation which by itself is incapable of guaranteeing adaptation. . . . A more primitive system is needed to supplement it” (13). In fact, every now and again, in the interests of psychic economy, securing pleasure, or advancing developmental issues, the ego will induce a giving up of its most differentiated functions.

Adolescence is one of those times when developmental issues are advanced by a temporary relinquishment of differentiation. In order for sexuality and morality to attain optimal maturity, the hard won emotional and intellectual differentiations of latency must be undone. I suspect, however, that the ego is not so entirely in command of this relinquishment of differentiation as Hartmann’s remarks would suggest.

From its inception psychoanalysis has shifted between two attitudes toward the dynamic interplay of sexuality and morality. The more conventional psychoanalytic attitude maintains that the moral sense flourishes during latency because during those years the child is relatively untroubled by the urgency of sexuality. The deferment of biological maturity allows the human child to acquire the rudiments of civilization before the eruption of genitality and the subsequent demands of family life and reproduction. However, it also has been central to psychoanalytic interests to question whether the moral forces which are synonymous with civilization necessarily be constructed at the cost of sexuality. An inherent pathogenic antagonism between the two is not an assumption of psychoanalysis.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud (1905) starts out by consenting to the idea that psychoanalysts were united with educators and other representatives of the authority of the social order in thinking and acting as though sexual activity would make a child ineducable. But he then comments on the limitations of that point of view. He says...