[Autonomy and separation dynamics of students].

A specific group, the patients of our Psychological Counselling Institute for students, was examined by means of a described projective test method. Essential subjects of dynamic forces of separation and autonomy in the late adolescent process of development could be proved and made evident. Obviously there is a distinctive need of separation and autonomy. On the way to autonomy there are barriers such as ambivalence, sense of guilt and deep fear of separation and loss in every dimension as far as suicide. Depressions may differ from the so-called adolescent-specific normative light depression, which suggests more likely to the fact of self-development. Getting to autonomy resp. the mastering of separation is the result of a described specific process of development.