During puberty, pre-adolescents get strongly close, supporting each other, once they know what it is like to feel those awkward and unkown experiences. It is a period of great intensity, confidence, of idealization. Privacy and complicity with friends of the same sex emerge as urgent needs. Friends of the same age “mirror” what happens inside them and, hence, start to work as behavioral models (admiration ones). At this time, your majesties: “mom and dad” fall off their thrones and are replaced by other identity models from pubers’ communities: teachers, pop stars, celebrities, etc. It is the beginning of the transition from child to adult’s identity. It is also time to get over “moral binarism”-yes or no; black or white; right or wrong- that describes child’s moral field. Their psychological safety is gone.
Meanwhile, an intellectual leap happens due to another change coming from hardware/: a logical reasoning take-off. New psyche’s condition could be expressed in the duet: sexual energy arousal and logical arguing abilities sophistication. As a result of it, teenagers start to get in touch with ambiguities.
P.A’s strong thesis is that sexual energy arousal brings up this new condition in teenagers personality. Aesthetic and moral children universes “expire” and anguish, linked to early years intuitive search is activated once again. Children’s emotional balance falls down. During childhood, belonging is taken for granted: it comes from school, clubs and places that shape their daily lives, chosen by parents or caregivers. This is how the world is. Puberty demands, most of the time, hard adaptation, because the ex-child doesn’t have references (models) of how to feel and behave under those new conditions. Sexual energy raises with unprecedented strength.
Considering that development always happens in cultural context, the double challenge is putting teenagers in contact with the transition to a personal life project
It is also time to abandon children’s identity references and embrace new challenging behavioral models. This is what it is like to be a normal teenager. The new psychological condition comes together with a new form of anguish:
Existential Anguish
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