Reflecting on the vicissitudes of adolescence, D.W. Winnicott wrote
"There exists one real cure for adolescence, and only one, and this cannot be of interest to the boy or girl who is in its throes. The cure for adolescence belongs to the passage of time and to the gradual maturational processes; these together do in the end result in the emergence of the adult person. This process cannot be hurried or slowed up, though indeed it can be broken into and destroyed.
We do need to remind ourselves that although adolescence is something that we always have with us, each adolescent boy or girl grows up in the course of a few years into an adult. Parents know this… and public irritation with the phenomenon of adolescence can easily be evoked by cheap journalism and by the public pronouncements of persons in key positions, with adolescence referred to as a problem, and the fact that each individual adolescent is in process of becoming a society-minded adult is left out of the argument".
D.W. Winnicott (1961) “Adolescence : struggling through the doldrums” in Family and Individual Development London Routledge (1989) p79
There is a lengthier discussion about adolescence in chapter 4 of “In Care, in Therapy” at http://www.goodenoughcaring.com/WritingsArticle.aspx?cpid=31
(First posted at http://www.goodenoughcaring/ on November 18th, 2010
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