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Volume 10, Number 2
July-December 2006

Adolescence in the psychoanalysis of young adults
Teresa Carratelli


SUMMARY

The author considers that, in psychoanalysis, it is opportune to explore and deal with the obstacles to the transformation of the adolescent mind that, on the developmental level, characterize a dis-harmonic and unbalanced ego-self functioning of these subjects who we may define as 'pre-adults'.

In particular, by means of short clinical examples, the author explore the role of an excess and deficit of the second censorship within the realm of what the Sandlers call 'the stabilizing function of the present unconscious'. While the Sandlers indicate this censor as the organizing function of the unconscious of the older child, the author suggests that it corresponds to the 'adolescent' as internal psychic organizer, of that which she indicates as 'process of preconscientization'.