Psychoanalysis, adolescence, and the identity problem.

Socio-cultural developments styled "postmodern" by some diagnosticians appear to have led to a so-called "de-centering" of the Subject and a dissolution of the unity between self and identity. Recent approaches in psychoanalysis (intersubjectivist, socioconstructivist, narrativist) faithfully reflect these developments, but in so doing threaten to forfeit essential elements of genuine psychoanalysis. Taking adolescence as an example, the author demonstrates that identity and subjectivity cannot be foreshortened to the status of an intersubjective construction or the "vanishing point" of a narration. Processes of maturation and development (in the form of sexual maturation and the development of new cognitive abilities) have to be integrated at a huge variety of levels. In psychoanalytic terms the author describes a number of distinctive features peculiar to this phase of development, features that should neither be declared pathological nor unthinkingly accepted as the expression of a new cultural "type." The conflict and innovation potential inherent in this phase is of major significance for an understanding of psychoanalysis determined not to relinquish a concern with the connection between psyche and physis.