Adolescence and Crisis

I have found that considering the “storm and stress” of adolescence is not only eye opening, but an urgent and necessary practice as well.  Parents, educators, theorists and psychoanalysts have spent lifetimes trying to understand this period that has come to be generally accepted as difficult and tumultuous.  While all of the authors we have read this week would agree that there is some biological contribution to these feelings of storm and stress – due to the significance of the physiological changes occurring within the bodies of adolescents – we see other, perhaps more significant, drivers as well.  Jeffrey Arnett and G. Stanley Hall both draw our attention to the significant role that culture and the established process of socialization play in either contributing to, or providing protection from the biological vulnerability of young men and women passing through this time we call adolescence.

In a culture that has developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for the ephemeral and material, I find Hall’s assertion that the storm and stress of adolescence is the by-product of a cultural evolution away from a value system based on the lasting and the directly tangible extremely illuminating.  Hall calls for a re-evaluation of education.  He asserts that due to “missing links and extinct ethnic types, much, perhaps most, soul life has been hopelessly lost” as man marches ever forward toward what we name – or at least hope is – progress.  This leaves our species afloat in the sea of our impermanent fads and phases and this feeling of being detached from our own evolutionary past cries out for a new educational establishment.  When we adopt Hall’s view of adolescence as a unique and necessary part of biologic, social, cultural, and soul-full evolution, we acknowledge the need to address each need directly and naturally through the educational experience.

Furthermore, Arnett skillfully debunks the theory that the difficulty of adolescence lays within deep-seated psychosis or abnormal states of mind left over from traumatic early childhood.  This Freudian point of view does little to advance the dialogue on adolescence.  Arnett also clearly demonstrates that storm and stress is not a universally experienced phenomenon and seems to develop only when a culture grows away from traditional values, beliefs, and social moorings.  With a rigorous academic pursuit as his evidence, Arnett adds immeasurable support to the theory that stress and storm is the result of the cultural dislocation of adolescence.  As I argued earlier, a meaningful cultural identity cannot be built upon ephemeral fads, material acquisition, blind ambition toward individuality, and the other hallmarks of contemporary western culture.

Ultimately, adolescence has become difficult for western youth because, in the words of Hall, we are: conquering nature, achieving magnificent material civilizations…but we are progressively forgetting that for the complete apprenticeship to life, youth needs repose, leisure, art, legends…in a word humanism.”  Instead, we have become a culture devoid of humanism, where interaction takes place at the keyboard, meaning is sought in shopping malls, and experience consists of what we see on TV between continually louder and brighter advertisements.  We are teaching youth that how you appear is significantly more important that what you actually are – simply because we no longer know what we, as human beings, actually are.  And while our youth search honestly and desperately to forge some semblance of an identity out of the wilderness of material, consumer culture, storm and stress seems to be the unfortunate evolutionary result.  Erik Erikson writes, in his essay on identity, that “certainly mere ‘roles’ played interchangeably, mere self-conscience ‘appearances,’ or mere strenuous ‘postures’ cannot possibly be the real thing, although they may be dominant aspects of what today is called the ‘search of identity.’”  I added the emphasis on “the real thing” because in the end, that thought is what lies in the heart of this issue.  We expect our adolescents to develop a sense of permanent and meaningful self out of the fleeting, soulless, cultural detachment that is 20^th and 21^st century society.  We have cut off at the roots our own human heritage leaving the majority of our people lost at sea and our adolescents the most obvious manifestation of that storm and stress.  In the end, we have lost our ability to identify the real thing.