(1988).

Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 14:67-80

Adolescent States of Mind Found in Patients of Different Ages
Seen in Analysis
James Astor

Introduction
In writing about adolescence as a state of mind I am following the analytic
tradition of thinking of the term as a reference point for not just a social
structure, i.e. an adolescent world, but for a social structure in the mind and in
that sense the term is technical and metapsychological. In the clinical material
that follows I shall present four different examples of the state of mind that is
adolescent in quality. The material is drawn from patients of different ages that I
do see and have seen regularly for analysis. Adolescence is a state of mind not
particular in our culture to an age group and the chief characteristic of
adolescence is the sense of fluidity that surrounds the feelings of identity. This is
managed within the adolescent social group. The first clinical description is of a
boy who is profoundly troubled by feelings of unreality and confusion, a boy
who has become an isolated young man stumbling in a world where hypocrisy is
indistinguishable from insincerity. The second description is briefer and focuses
on an aspect of the adolescent group mentality found in a middle-aged woman.
The third case brings forward an aspect of adolescence that has lip service paid
to it as being necessary, namely the defiant, rebellious, questioning and
experimental manifestations of the turmoil that accompanies the change from
latency to adulthood. In this example, however, the adolescent structures have
rigidified and a lethal murderer is revealed to inhabit the inner world. The final
example presents a dream and a piece of symptomatic behaviour from the
analysis of a woman who has been struggling with problems of superficiality
and authenticity in her relationships with men, struggling with the realisation that
she has no reliable principles to help her think about her behaviour.
What is the main constituent that enables us to identify adolescent states of
mind? Primarily it is the feeling of the centre of gravity, of the sense of identity
shifting and shifting wildly. Let me quote Meltzer here:
This phenomenon, the continual shifting of the centre of gravity of the
sense of identity, produces the characteristic quality of emotional
instability seen in adolescence and since it is based on the underlying
splitting processes, the varying states of mind are in very little contact
with one another.
(D. Meltzer, 1973)

First Clinical Description

Introduction
A young man who came into analysis with me when he was fifteen and has
tended to come and go over the years is possessed by a feeling about himself

- 67 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

that he is unwanted, unacceptable, a dirty reject, smelly, faecal, of no interest to

others except as an object of disgust. He dresses in torn unwashed clothes, is
malodorous, usually unshaven, and recently much preoccupied with his own
health. Every day he talks about the chest infection, or viral condition he
imagines he has and accompanying this account is a description of how doctors
do not take him seriously. The immense rage that boils within him and is only
just contained in the sessions oscillates on the one hand between a desire to
engage me in fights, to denigrate and prevail over me, and on the other to
threaten to take his own life by either jumping out of the window now during the
session or by some other method. I take his rage very seriously but there is not
much actual credibility attached to his suicidal thoughts. He does not plan his
suicide nor seek out suitable locations.
This is a change from when he did make two attempts on his own life. He
feels his life is meaningless and is bitterly resentful of his parents. He considers
them to be failures who always pick the wrong people, perennial losers. That's
why, he says, he is with me! He lives at home, is an only child and is supported
by his parents. But he feels excluded by them from their marriage. There is much
evidence to suggest that the exclusion he finds unbearable is from what is
loosely called the primal scene but the particular quality of the exclusion
contains a difficulty centring on his feelings of identity. There now follows a
session from this boy's material. I have disguised certain references for the sake
of confidentiality.

Clinical material
He comes in and doesn't look at me but turns the chair away so that I can not
see his full face. He puts down the paper he has been reading on the Tube. He
turns to me and says I have decided to give up what is bad for me. Oh yes, I
say, what is that?. My parents, he replies. They do not know who I am. If I
say to my mother, Fuck off, she cries. If I say, Hello funny face, she smiles.
She is happy. They do not know what to do with me. They are both the same.
In what way? I ask.
He embarks on an explanation that is garbled and my face reflects my
incomprehension. He looks at me crossly and says, I don't have to tell you.
Talking in a very quiet voice he begins to describe how he feels he is not
understood, that everyone lives pointless lives, but underneath they have other
lives, except his parents.
In my thinking, I understand him to mean that he takes his parents at face value
and that whatever he says cannot be right. In this world he inhabits everyone,
including himself, but excluding his parents are feeling the opposite of whatever
they appear to be presenting on the surface. That is the reference to the
underneath, secret life.
He now recounts asking his mother about the events surrounding his birth. He
knows that this is going to upset his mother and make his father cross with him.
He persists. His mother says she would prefer not to go over it

- 68 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

all again and begins to cry. His father now gets cross. I have been listening to
what he is saying, recognising that he is wondering what will goad me into
anger, but the boy continues that his parents are keeping secrets from him, that
there is something that they are not telling him. I interrupt his narrative and ask
him what he thinks that it might be. He says, It doesn't matter because what they
will tell me will not be the truth anyway. I query his denial of his wish to know
about the experience he feels excluded from. His response is to say, I went to
the library the other day and I looked up the history of your family. No one is
what they seem to be, I say. This leads him to talk about money. I continue by
saying that money certainly is powerful stuff, in fact it seems to have an
overpowering influence on his feelings about the real identity of people,
including himself. I wonder out loud whether what he is telling me is that the
feelings he has about money can really overwhelm his personality. This is a
reference to how he feels he would be a different person if he were rich. He
now takes off into one of his characteristic flights. It takes the form of a personal
attack on my appearance, my imagined wife (followed by a sniff of the couch)
and inquiry into my practice, my income, the decoration of the consulting room.
He paces the room while this is going on and it culminates in him picking up the
cushion from the couch and pushing it into my face.
At this point he has gone too far into enactment within the session, and I
decide to bring together what I have understood. I return to the beginning of the
session and link his behaviour to the material about his not being understood and
his parents not wanting him around, expressed by, I have decided to give up
what is bad for me, my parents. He took this up and agreed with me that he felt
that his parents got on better without him.
There have been many sessions similar to this illustrating how he felt, but I
particularly wanted to refer to the sniffing of the couch and his wondering about
how he too could be loved. It seemed that he was trying to tell me that I, like his
mother was disappointed that he was a boy, that underneath he felt like a girl,
that he had private feelings about his femininity, his secret life, and that the only
way he felt he could express his love for the analytic parent was by going away,
preferably by being sent as a result of unacceptable behaviour, viz. the cushion. I
felt also but did not say that I thought he was wondering if I would be interested
in him and that I had an underneath secret life, a bit threatening maybe, but
making me more like him than his parents whom he took at face value.

Discussion
What does this material mean? I would suggest that it means that he seeks to
manage his fear of being separate from his mother by projectively identifying
with her. This is a reference to the birth and the events surrounding it. His
transference relationship with me includes the wish to be passively stimulated
into a productive and fertile state of mind and to the extent that

- 69 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

there is an anal-sadistic constituent to this it takes the form of being buggered by

my money. For him money is powerful stuff; with money he could be anyone, do
anything, money is power, real power. With money he thinks that he would be
interesting to other people, a somebody. Money is the reward for the envied
capacity to work. As he thinks about it in relation to me it is an instrument of my
independence, that I am not threatened by it, nor trapped by it in the way that he
is trapped by being at home but not able to leave. Linked to these preoccupations
with identity are difficulties that he has of distinguishing between a person's
social manner and hypocrisy.
Civility, interest and attention on my part are thought by him to be the
behaviour of a hypocrite, who really is wishing all his patients would go away.
Similarly his parents' politeness to one another and tolerance of him and his
aggressive surliness, he considers hypocritical, on the basis of his occasional
successes in goading them to lose their tempers and to say something vigorous
and unguarded; this he then considers to be what they really feel about him for
all time, not just at that moment.
What importantly this material contains is a lack of correspondence between
his physical identity, i.e. his presentation of himself as a young man, tramp-like
dishevelled and uncared for, and his emotional identity, which was sometimes
feminine in its longings. This lack of correspondence gives substance to his
view of the world that people are not what they appear to be. Sometimes he
feels manly, sometimes womanly, often childlike, a no-man, and oscillating
within these states he has bouts of omniscient understanding. Everyone has a
secret life and he thinks he knows what it is. It is as if in his masturbation he
seeks to control the parental intercourse, to be both a generator of semen and a
receiver of it. In other words he wishes to place himself between his parents in
bed to receive his father and be potent with his mother.

Theoretical considerations
The idea of varying states of mind not being in contact with one another
(Meltzer, 1973), is also described by Michael Fordham in his researches into
self objects. In Fordham's work the concept of the self object is defined as
part of the self merging with an object to record and focus on states of the self.
Let it be assumed that perception, whether in an adult or a baby, is an
active event and also grant that any object perceived is composite. It
is not only a record of what is out there but it is also contributed to by
a part of the self which is put into it to give the object meaning. When
the object is mainly a record of reality, it may be called a reality
object; when it is mainly constructed by the self and so records states
of the self, made out of exteroceptive and introceptive sense data, then
it may be called a self object. It used to be assumed among analytical
psychologists (e.g. Neumann, 1973) that a baby's perception was
predominantly through self objects and that he lived in a sort of
mythological world, all the time only gradually building up a picture
of reality. That is a very misleading account of infancy. If, however, a
sliding scale

- 70 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

is envisaged to cover the variable content of any particular perception

(real object self object) then one can study observation in that light.
The scheme will accommodate projective identification when a self
object can either gain information about a real object or eliminate it. It
appears that self objects increase in affectively charged states, whilst
in quiet contemplative exploring activities real objects predominate.
(Fordham, 1985)
This quotation from Fordham's latest book Explorations into the Self
(Fordham, 1985), describes theoretically what I have illustrated clinically. This
young man is possessed of an idea of himself as a rejected unwanted child. He
lives parasitically on his parents. He is on Fordham's sliding scale identified
with a malignant self object. His perception of himself is mainly contributed to
by introceptive sense data qualitatively felt to consist of mainly that which was
unwanted: the dirty, smelly and discarded. In describing this young man's
denigrated self object I am describing but one characterological aspect of his
identity difficulties. Related to this but not the same are his ideas about how he
might have been received if he had been a girl. As often as what I have
described above being the centre of his thoughts he would talk about his need for
a special wise person to come into his life. He would then describe himself as
clever, possessed of an understanding not given to many, with attributes rare and
inhuman requiring a superior person to recognise them. This inflated language
seemed to me to contain a poignant wish for the recognition and understanding
that a mother who thinks about her child might provide. Bion has described this
as one of the primary functions of mothering, the establishing inside the child of
a thinking object that gives meaning to experience (Bion, 1977). To express this
in a different way, there was here some evidence in this adolescent of a
rudimentary thought disorder, probably deriving from his infancy and early
childhood. This disorder was to be found in the difficulty he had in transforming
emotional experiences into a symbolic form so that he could have them available
for thought. Instead they remained beta elements (Bion, 1977), got rid of into his
soma, that is into his chest and his symptoms of wheeziness. In Money Kyrle's
(Kyrle, 1978) terms he has failed to form a concept of a good breast. He has the
words for it but has neither experienced it nor does he seem to have had any
idiographic representation of it, that is any dream thoughts about it. For a long
period of his analysis his chestiness was a major part of his daily
preoccupations, that is the discharge into the soma of those elements that could
not be transformed into some idea or feeling, that could be thought about and
borne in mind. The oscillation between feeling denigrated to feeling exalted
could occur quickly within sessions or between them. This difficulty with
feelings about identity is a major characteristic of adolescence. In this particular
instance there is a substantial pathological constituent as well.
I am going to leave this troublesome child now with his problem of isolation
and confusion about who he really is, and contrast it with a state of mind

- 71 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

where membership of a group provides a receptacle for the projection of and

subsequent identification with split off parts of the personality.

Second Clincial Description

Introduction
In establishing the text with a new patient who comes for analysis, it seems to
me that it is necessary to identify for oneself the characteristics of the patient's
mental operations and of his use of language and vocabulary with its references
actual and implied to development and pathology. During this initial orientation
it has become more apparent to me how potent the feeling of being part of a
group is in the life of the individual, potent not only vis vis an external group
but also internally as a mental operation. For instance, those phenomena
described by Bion as characteristic of Basic Assumption Groups are to be found
in the individual's thought processes as Dr Meltzer discovered in his consulting
room and reported on in Studies in Extended Metapsychology (Meltzer, 1986).
This is particularly so when the identity of the individual is felt by them to be
precarious and unreliable, whether because based on splitting processes or
based on a feeling of fraudulence. This feeling of fraudulence characterised the
personality of the middle-aged woman whom I am now going to describe.

Clinical material
A middle-aged woman, who is a personal assistant to a successful business
woman, has a loyalty to her working group, her colleagues, that derives in part
from their mutually supportive grumbling about their employer. Now while there
are aspects of the relationship with the employer that bring into the consulting
room my patient's relationship with her husband, by far the most important
emphasis of this relationship is that to her employer is attached that aspect of her
own sexual behaviour that she has not given expression to in her own life. She
will describe, for instance, being summoned into the presence of her employer
and instead of being given instructions and tasks she will be given confidential
and highly risky, not to say occasionally salacious, titbits of the personal life of
her boss.
This description in the sessions is understood by me as a description of the
psychic reality of her own world, in which in this instance she is participating
vicariously in the exciting sex life of her employer with whom she is identified.
My patient feels dowdy and unglamorous; her employer seems to her elegant and
vivacious, an exciting bitch attracting the most interesting dogs in the park. Her
boss dominates, she submits, but in her mind she is the one in the Regent's park
and it is the Cruft's champion who is pursuing her. This image of canine
pleasures is not fortuitous since it conjures up the idea of sexual gratifications
without responsibility.
From the point of view of trying to think about one's patient's behaviour
developmentally the idea above has the hallmarks of an adolescent state of

- 72 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

mind. It is an exclusive group, the hierarchy is sexual, and the delegation of

various attributes of one's personality to other group members for the vicarious
participation in them has the emotional quality of this age group. Within the
group each person has his own role which may fluctuate but the membership of it
greatly simplifies for the group members the internal fluctuations in the feelings
they have about themselves.

Discussion
Bion writing in Experiences in Groups (Bion, 1961) says: The individual is
a group animal at war, not simply with the group, but with himself for being a
group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his
groupishness. But with the adolescent so much of the personality is expressed
by the group, and the war is more often between rival groups rather than within
them although this too is an inevitable outcome. To the extent that the individual
adolescent is at war with a parent group it is because it represents the existing
order.
It is my thesis, deriving from Meltzer's development of Bion, that
adolescence is a state of mind common to all age groups. In the older patient,
however, vivid states of flux are less likely to overwhelm the personality for
such long periods; except in states of turmoil, of being in love, of living with
one's heart in one's mouth when the upheaval is much more prolonged. Then it is
difficult to know, as Bion has described (Bion, 1970), how the intruder or in this
instance the intruding experience is going to be received by the group, or
internal group structures, since it is potentially both creative and destructive.
This experience is similar to the group's difficulty in assimilating what he calls
the mystic, which I am likening to the difficulty the adult patient, with his
internalised group and its necessary conventions (what you might call his
internal Establishment), has in assimilating a new and powerful experience of,
for instance, being in love.
For the older patient the intensity of the experience of being in love can be as
strong as for the actual adolescent but the difference is that it is less gonadally
driven, there is less of an imperative to action, more adult structures in the mind
enable the turmoil to be mediated. But few of us are genuine revolutionaries.
When it comes to tolerating living in turmoil most of us are petit bourgeois,
pulled back to the comfortable or familial patterns, to less painful states of mind.
Being in love as I have described it is never going to be popular as an
experience to be lived as a way of life; it will never cease to be popular,
however, as a vicarious experience to be read about in books and looked in on
in films and television programmes. The difference between an adolescent state
of mind and an actual adolescent is that for the actual adolescent revolution
predominates not bourgeois values, living on the knife-edge of pain and turmoil
with its total commitment to experiments in being, which can at times have the
quality of psychotic-like states of identification. For actual adolescents the
emphasis in their experiments with

- 73 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

themselves are more on the body, its surfaces and orifices. Quite different from
the experience of my dowdy patient, a mother, who participates vicariously in
the complicated paramour life of her glamorous employer, and for whom the
parent group is represented by the eminent people in the boss's world, who are
to the child in her like her parents, unavailable because having an exciting time
elsewhere.
That is not to say that the states of mind that I have been describing are not
adolescent in character. If you enquire into adolescents' group life you will find
that not only do they have a role in their group, even if it is that of the outcast,
but also that the group members represent projected parts of their psyche.
Sometimes this projection can take on a delusional quality and this can in certain
circumstances lead to a breakdown of an analysis. One such experience of mine
concerned an ideological patient, whom I will now discuss.

Third Clinical Description

Miss X had the appearance of a sixties flower child and was in her late
thirties when she came to me for analysis. She wore natural fabrics, ate natural
foods, loved to feel the freedom of the wind in her hair as she bicycled through
the park, and strapping her baby on her back she would march with the parade to
protest against social issues. Her demeanour was modest and she looked gentle
and concerned. Underneath this veneer, however, lurked an ideologue. By this I
mean one in whom the fiery idealism of adolescence, that led her to espouse
causes and feel passionate about injustice, has rigidified. This wish to change
society when channelling a partly conscious desire of many within a society, as
in America with the Vietnam war in 1968, can bring about real political change.
But in this patient her motive had more to do with her idea of herself than with a
wish to effect real change. Her objectives were personal and goal seeking
(concerned with an end rather than a direction). In the consulting room this
rigidified patient presented a real difficulty.
She saw in me, that is in my silent appearance a representative of the enemy
of her ideology. At first I did not realise how important insignia were for her in
denoting attitudes of mind. For instance she cried bitter tears about the changing
of her car, associated with unconventional people, for another associated with
ordinary people. She assumed that men dressed in jackets and ties were wearing
a uniform that denoted extreme right wing opinions. Her outward demeanour
concealed an inward sneer of contempt. But these attributes of her personality,
hierarchical and unexamined by her, were fiercely protected by what looked like
paranoid ways of thinking lying beneath a quick touchiness that led to
argumentativeness. She could not bear to have these fixed ideas of hers
investigated for the elucidation of the infantile transference aspects of them. The
result of this was that eventually, after two years, the analysis ended. In the
submerged infrastructure of her personality was a highly developed early
warning system. If I began to uncover it she would groan, exclaim Oh No, Oh
God, and then become silent or even on one

- 74 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

occasion when my probing was not spotted until well advanced, leave the room.
I understood that the ideological content was a barrier to the experience of the
analysis since it was used to sabotage repeatedly the personal meaning and
significance of her experiences in the analysis. For instance, in her personal
history she had had multiple abortions, but it was never possible to sustain a
detailed consideration of the enviously destructive abortionist in her.
Persistence on my part was experienced as evidence of my authoritarian wish to
cut her down to size. I am not here referring to working with a patient who did
not know how to co-operate with the analyst. What I am referring to is that
mindclosing clunk that sounded as soon as the child in her entered the consulting
room.

Discussion
The relevance of this patient to the theme of adolescence is that her manner,
appearance, and the ostensible content of her material was similar to the
adolescent inflation that I described with the young man, when he was talking
about needing some special person who would understand him. In particular she
held fast to the idea that she had absolute clarity of insight. This omniscience is
more accurately thought of as a thought disorder and in her analysis it was
suffused with a hierarchical view of the world where sexual dominance and
submission constituted the motive for behaviour. This delusion applied not only
to her own history but to historical events. In terms of the dynamics of the
analysis she was identified with a mother, who, to the child in her, knows it all.
The father's role was that of a dangerous and unsettling intruder into this
psychotic world: the surgeon abortionist with his cutting knife of a mind. As a
state of mind encountered in an older patient I agreed with her after two years of
trying that it was not productive to continue and that the reason for this lay in the
alliance between the abortionist and the ideologue: the former did not allow the
child to come into existence in the consulting room and the latter greeted the
analytic process with slogans.

Fourth Clinical Description

Introduction
In contrast to this I would like as my final clincial description to discuss
Miss A. She was an attractive woman of forty in the fourth year of her analysis,
which had been mainly concerned with her attempts to free herself from the
carapace of superficiality and social values that prevented her from developing.
(Development occurs within intimate relationships which are concerned with
truth and sincerity. Social relationships and social values are concerned neither
with truth nor sincerity but with basic assumption levels of mentality.) She had
the following dreams with some interesting symptomatic behaviour between
them.

- 75 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

Clincial Material
In the first dream: she was in a valley between two mountains
climbing down the rocky surface with her boyfriend. She climbs down
a fern tree and he goes first and catches her as she comes down,
although she is confident that she can manage on her own. She now
approaches a house built into the side of the mountain, which she
recognises as a house that was once her home but is now a hostel. She
sees, walking backwards as she approaches, a woman in a cocktail
dress who is giving her instructions. Once inside the building it is like
her present London flat and she is wearing silk pyjamas. Then she
notices that the blinds are not down and the people in the council flats
can see into her flat. They look in from the back of the building.
Now as the patient and I circle round this dream for the associations and
ideas that we have about it, the following emerges. The lady in the cocktail
dress is a teacher on the course she is interested in. The climb down refers to
her feeling that the course that the lady in the cocktail dress is offering her is a
bit of a climb down for her. The cocktail dress is what her boyfriend gave her
for her birthday present. Her mother lives in a council flat near to where she
lives and her recollection of her mother's last visit to her flat was that she
looked all round her possessions making pointedly envious remarks, until finally
picking up a picture of the patient aged three, in a frame, she said Who is this
ugly child?. Her further associations to her mother were of a strained visit to
her and her mother watching Dallas and seeing in the characters the portrayal of
her own family life. Now bearing in mind what I said about the substance of her
analysis being about the struggle to establish intimate relationships in the face of
an armour of social values, it was clear that this dream was pointing to
something very important developmentally in the life of this woman.
The dream seemed to be saying that there was an area of her personality that
saw the world in terms of hierarchic structures, that is the up and down. The
woman walking backwards in the cocktail dress was presenting to her an image
of herself going through life wrapped up in the values of the cocktail party, an
arse backwards approach to life. We knew also that the person in the dress was
a potential evaluator of her performance on the course which was the climb
down. The patient made a pun on the woman's name which suggested she felt the
woman gave good value in her dressed-up self, good value for her social
whoring. Once inside the building, enveloped as she was in the sensuousness of
her silk pyjamas, she was aware of being looked into; of her mother and her
potential clients looking into her flat and seeing her decorations. Into this picture
came her mother asking, Who is this ugly child?
It seems to me that for this woman to emerge from her social preoccupations
with wealth, kudos, status, the world of Dallas, she has to feel naked and
infantile; that in her analysis we have to address the issue of her internal beauty,
namely the potential in the child, which she is not interested in. She

- 76 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

is mainly interested in perfecting her imitation of the grown-ups. Who is this

ugly child? I found myself wondering if this patient felt ugly as a little girl and if
this carapace of social values was put on by her at adolescence. In other words,
as her body changed so she put out of sight the ugly child and donned the armour
of the sexual woman, imitating mummy. That beauty, in other words, is a matter
of decoration, of what you put on yourself, clothes, degrees, status,
qualifications, and not a matter of internal beauty. Certainly it has been
perplexing her for some time that my analysis has been about her internal beauty,
and that this has necessitated the urchin having a good scrub, about which she
has protested vigorously.
Now that I had some material and an idea arising from it, namely that of the
ugly child concealed within the sexual armour of her mother, I began to
investigate this and what emerged was that the child she had been was thin,
potbellied like a famine child, physically awkward, and ugly. It further emerged
that she had begun menarche late and did not actually develop physically into a
sexually attractive woman until her late teens and early twenties. She
recollected those awful years of adolescence, when with a friend she would go
to the youth club and hope against hope that no boy would talk to her. If he did
she would immediately introduce him to her girlfriend.
She now reported another dream. In this dream she was at a conference and
her boyfriend was there. The centre of attention, however, was a man she knew
slightly and with whom she had had a secret sexual liason during the period of
this relationship with her boyfriend Martin. In this dream she was very anxious
that Tom, the man who is the centre of attention, will come over to her and greet
her in an intimate way that will reveal to Martin, her boyfriend, that she and
Tom have been more than good friends. She tries to signal to Tom, he sees her,
comes over and politely shakes her hand and begins to talk to Martin, thereby
joining with her in deceiving him.
Prior to talking about this dream she had begun the session with an account of
how she felt something was happening to her but she was not sure what it was; it
was like the anticipation of her earlier years in her twenties, when she felt
awkward, heavy-limbed, uncoordinated but also excited. Now putting these
juxtaposed sequences together and bearing in mind what had gone before, it
seemed to me that this second dream was saying something about the carapace
she was putting on when she put on her mother's sexual armour. In other words
the men she is frightened of are the men she has been to bed with, e.g. Tom in the
dream. Sexual anxiety, that is the awkwardness in her body, has been replaced
by sexual secrecy. Martin must not know. The route from the awkward and ugly
child to the duplicitous sexual woman is via the projective identification into her
mother's body. My analysis of this was based on my thinking that this occurred
originally when the ugly child developed into the physically mature woman.
After I had formulated this to her she went on to describe what had happened
to her the previous day. (Miss A had consistently advanced the analysis

- 77 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

by bringing forward difficult and at times self-indicting material in a

constructive way.) She had been at a further training course she had been
attending for six months when a man came up to her and her friend and asked if
he might join them when they went for a coffee. She felt awkward, confused, and
embarrassed as if she was a young girl being picked up by a young man with a
sexual interest in her. She was bubbling with sexual excitement. On the way to
the coffee shop she fell, grazed her leg and had to return to the place of work,
leaving her friend to go with the man.

Discussion
This excerpt from the analysis of this forty-year-old woman seems to me to
give a vivid example of an adolescent structure in the mind being part of the
living present of this person's life. In particular this symptomatic behaviour, the
falling, with its hysterical reference to the adolescent fear of falling pregnant,
seemed to highlight a sequence that began with the investigation of the ugly
child. She then showed me how she concealed the dirty and ugly child in the
beautiful wrapping of mummy's body when she became projectively identified
with her and her secretive and tricky sexuality. This occurred when her body
changed to that of a grown woman's. In between there is the reference to the
adolescence she is having in her analytic upbringing, when bursting with fertility
and the fear of pregnancy she falls in the road on the way to the coffee bar with
her friend.

Reflections on Analytical Psychology

I would now like to refer what I have written to the scientific tradition of
Analytical Psychology and Jung's ideas as they have been developed by Michael
Fordham, since they inform my approach to the patient and my analytic practice.
The descriptions above are based on the experience of analysis being an open
system, that is that patient and analyst interact, change and transform themselves
in relation to one another. By taking in the patient's unconscious phantasies and
working on them within oneself one can gather valuable information about one's
patient. This is what Fordham calls syntonic counter-transference (Fordham,
1985) and it is based on Jung's idea that the introjection of a patient's material
has therapeutic potential. There are all sorts of dangers to this too, which come
under the heading of acting in the counter-transference. But putting those to one
side what does seem to be clear is that by the processes of introjection,
projection and identification, affective information is gathered which underpins
the actual technique of the analyst. During this process what we as Analytical
Psychologists have as a starting point is a self, probably without characteristics,
that acquires characteristics through deintegration and reintegration; that this is
paralleled in the analytic process by the approach to the patient without
preconceptions, which then develops through making a part of oneself available
to the patient in a deintegrative way, thus facilitating the development of
characteristic emotional states of mind that can be studied as part of the
transference relationship.

- 78 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

If what we do helps our patients make sense of their past so much the better, but
it is not the main objective of our work. Nor at the end of an analysis does their
family myth and memories have the same importance for them; not because new
facts have emerged but because history as an explanatory hypothesis is no longer
of interest to them; trying to understand has taken the place of explanation
(Meltzer, 1986). As far as adolescence and adolescent states of mind are
concerned what I particularly value about working in this way is what we, as
analytic parents, are presented with, namely that we do not bring up children but
that we preside over and facilitate a process that is individual to each person.
As in parenthood so in analysis it is our tolerance of the impotence of this
position that is strengthened by viewing it in this way.

Conclusion
In this paper I presented material from the analyses of four patients all of
different ages and brought forward from these clinical descriptions evidence for
the proposition that adolescence is as much a state of mind as a description of a
particular age group. I base the evidence on the clinical experience of working
as an Analytical Psychologist investigating the transference, the meaning and the
significance of my patient's dreams, and scrutinising new pieces of evidence as
they arise. The influence of Fordham's valuing of the scientific approach to the
unconscious as set out by Jung and the immense contributions he has made to our
understanding of the analysis of transference informs my approach. The central
idea that adolescence is a state of mind derives from Meltzer (Meltzer, 1961).
His understanding of introjective and projective identification has greatly
influenced my thinking about clinical material. Jung in his paper The Stages of
Life (Jung, 1931) considers the continuation of adolescence into the second
half of life as a poor substitute for the necessary reflection about one's self that
is the real task of this period. And Meltzer, developing Bion's work on groups,
has drawn our attention to the existence of basic assumption structures in the
mind.

References
Bion, W.R. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock. []
Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock. []
Bion, W.R. (1977) Transformations. In: Seven Servants. New York: Aronson.
Bion, W.R. (1977) Elements of Psychoanalysis. In: Seven Servants. New York:
Aronson.
Fordham, M. (1985) Explorations into the Self, Vol. 7 Library of Analytical
Psychology. London: Academic Press.

- 79 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

Jung, C.G. (1931) The Stages of Life. In: The Collected Works, Vol. 8, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Meltzer, D.M. (1973) Sexual States of Mind. Strath Tay: Clunie Press. []
Meltzer, D.M. (1986) Facts and Fictions. In: Studies in Extended
Metapsychology. Strath Tay: Clunie Press. []
Money-Kyrle, R. (1978) Cognitive Development. In: Collected Papers of R.
Money-Kyrle. Strath Tay: Clunie Press.
Neumann, E. (1973) The Child. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

- 80 -

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.

Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Astor, J. (1988). Adolescent States of Mind Found in Patients of Different Ages
Seen in Analysis. J. Child Psychother., 14:67-80

Copyright 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of CLU.