Attachment-Individuation: Clinical Notes Toward a Reconsideration of “Adolescent Turmoil”

Abstract

Although “adolescent turmoil” has been considered normative in adolescence by generations of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, I cite research to demonstrate (a) that such distress is less common than is generally believed, and that when it occurs (b) it is better understood as emanating from difficulties in the attachment-individuation process than from separation distress, which many have believed normally accompanies the adolescent passage to adulthood. This shift allows for a clearer distinction between healthy and pathological development. The clinical presentation of (a) extreme ambivalence toward parents and (b) dramatic symptoms that often contain concretized expressions of developmental needs and intersubjectively discordant responses to those needs (see also Doctors, 1987) can be recognized as signifying disordered attachment processes rather than normal adolescent separation issues.

Keywords:

• adolescence
• adolescent turmoil
• attachment
• attachment-individuation
• individuation
• separation

Notes

¹ Esman, A. H. (2000), Adolescent Psychiatry (Vol. 25). Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, Inc.

² Doctors, S. (2007). On utilizing attachment theory and research in self psychology/intersubjective clinical work. In: New Developments in Self Psychology Practice, eds. P. Buirski & A. Kottler. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

³ This is the conflict Brandchaft has been describing in his seminal psychoanalytic contributions (1987a {with Stolorow and Atwood}, 1988, 1992, 1993).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shelley R. Doctors

Shelley Doctors, Ph.D., is on the Faculty and is a Supervising Analyst at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity in NYC; at National Institute for the Psychotherapies in NYC; and at ICP&P in Washington, D.C. The immediate past President of IAPSP, she has written more than 40 book chapters and journal articles and co-authored “Toward an Emancipatory Psychoanalysis: Brandchaft’s Intersubjective Vision.”