Psychopathology of Adolescence

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Abstract
Various theoretical assessments of the problem of adolesence and the pathological processes which may be awakened by it have considered the phenomenon of "time diffusion," or time coming to a stop. References are also made to the difficulty that most disturbed adolescents have in differentiating or separating from the maternal object, because of problems of fixation upon and identification with a depriving figure. The thesis of this paper is that evidence can be found in the clinical and psychological observation of these adolescents which points to their extraordinary preoccupation with achieving alternate fusion with, and differentiation from the mother or maternal surrogates, as a function of spatial rather than temporal parameters. Spatial is used in the sense of the perception of adjacency, contiguity, simultaneity, and immediacy of objects rather than of the sequence, ordering, or becoming, of temporal perception. Thus A. Freud writes of the need

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