Adolescence and psychosis

Abstract

From the perspective of Winnicott, thisstudy aims to show that it is possible, although not easy, to identify whether a particular adolescent is ill or merely manifests characteristics of his/her age. The nature of the anxieties that afflict the adolescent, especially the one whohas had a good start, helps us to understand psychotic anxieties: on abandoning the well-known territory of the family world and entering a wider one, the adolescent is exposed to primitive anxieties. He/she does not yet feel at home in a pubertal body, which is overwhelmed by instincts and endowed with a new, frightening potency, and barely knows of him/herselfand his/her identity in this new situation between the recently abandoned childhood and the adult world awaiting with expectations. During this more or less long interregnum, the adolescent suffers from unreality, doldrums and struggles to feel real. He/she is driven by an inflexible morality, not in terms of what has been socially established as good or evil –which is precisely what he/she despises,and against which he/she rebels –but in terms of what is felt as real and what is felt as false, which approaches him/her of schizoidia.