The status of psychic reality in adolescence. An adult female patient's quasi-adolescent material and the analyst's counter transference response.

The author holds that the crisis of adolescence is in fact one of psychic reality, its elements being loss of boundaries, externalisation and the involvement of a third party. In this view, it is essential to conceive of adolescence differently from adulthood, in that, for example, an adolescent's acting out may not be solely a matter of regression but to a considerable extent a consequence of his or her physical development. It is noted that the boundaries between psychic and material reality are fluid throughout life and that adolescents crave identificatory models. The author stresses the importance of the psychic reality of the other in the adolescent's crisis. After considering various views, including those of Freud, on psychic reality and the crises of adolescence, he illustrates his thesis by the clinical example of two adolescent episodes of perversion forming part of an adult female patient's material. In the author's view, these instances of acting out had helped the patient to regain her auto-erotic capacity in the pleasure of fantasy life. He considers that a mutative interpretation must touch upon the primal fantasy and therefore involve the entire person of the analyst in the transference.