NORMAL ADOLESCENCE

The GAP Committee on Adolescence takes a comprehensive approach, biological, cultural and psychological, to the nature of adolescence, applying the concepts and insights of psychoanalytic psychiatry in their treatment of the subject. Setting out with the belief in the vital importance of conceiving of adolescence as a constructive stage in human development for both the individual and society, they indicate the universal tasks of adolescence, the advance, at differing degrees, to adult function and status, the common problems of adolescence, the relation of adult to adolescent. They chart the development from onset to offset of relationship with the opposite sex, relate the value of coital experience to the maturity of the adolescent. ""Our society seems to be drifting further and further away from the old concepts of morality to some new although still dimly perceived ordering of sex life."" A sound psychoanalytic, ""middle class"" orientation prevails; the likely referral, parents and teachers.