[Adolescence: viewpoints from adolescent psychiatry].

Adolescence is a phase of human development which is marked by a high vulnerability due to the ongoing psycho-physiological transformations. The regulation of the self-esteem is especially in danger in youngsters who went into adolescence with a marked burden of conflicts or who lived in families with disturbed intrafamilial dynamics. To be present as a partner and not to find the solutions for the adolescents' conflicts, to accept their questioning of what is established and to recognize their movements of reconciliation are the quite complex demands put on to the world of the adults. Adolescents urge us to a review of our own adolescence, to a balancing of hate and love, openness and rigidity, and to dialectic movements between disintegration and reintegration as well as between the generations. Any help, be it on the physical, the social or the psychic level, should be directed toward a restitution of the intrapsychic, intrafamilial or intergenerational balance; sociocultural factors have also always to be respected. The helpers--especially in a culture with rapid change--are often confronted with their own adolescence, which took place a generation before and mostly under totally different conditions.