Normal Adolescents

WITHIN THE FIELD of adolescent psychiatry descriptions of typical or behavior are particularly difficult to formulate. Emotional conflicts seen as normal adolescent turmoil by one investigator may be regarded as psychopathological process by another. Freud 1 has stated: upholding of a steady equilibrium during the adolescent process is in itself abnormal. Does that mean, then, that it is to be in constant turmoil? Or does that mean that emotional conflicts which are seen as adolescent turmoil by one investigator may be regarded as psychopathological process by another? Clinical descriptions of the functioning of an adolescent described as healthy are often couched in the same terms as are the diagnoses of adolescent patients regarded as sick. (Our approach to the problem of health and illness is discussed at length in Normality . 2 ) The purpose of the model adolescent project which we are