☞「心の丸窓」は心の杜の医師・心理師による心の診療に関するコラムです。

Round window of the mind is the column about mental therapy written by doctors of Kokoronomori Shinjuku Clinic.

Adolescence is a very important phase of life for one’s mental development, but at the same time, it is a very difficult time to pass through as well. This time, I would like to think a little bit about this.

One of the tasks of adolescence is to adjust and accept their sexual bodies. The Oedipal conflicts (the wish to become a partner of the opposite sex parent and the conflicts with the same sex parent) revive in this period and it had to be worked through again.

Another very important task is to establish their adult identity, in another word, to become independent from their parents. This task is far more difficult than one would imagine, because they also feel terribly anxious about themselves feeling inadequate and inferior to other adults. They need to fight with their parents and what represent parents, such as schoolteachers, authorities, etc. to gain their own sense of value or way of thinking. These attempts sometime take the forms of rebellious, or even, violent behaviour.

I am not saying that this process always would be safe and smooth. It could follow a tragic consequence. However, parents can not prevent the tragedy anymore as they could before, because parents do not have power to protect their children and themselves from adolescents’ overwhelming impulse.

Gugan