Abstract
This paper is an attempt to delineate some specific factors in the terminal phase of adolescence in the current social scene which act as impediments to becoming adult and accepting adult roles and responsibilities.
Part of the problem is the adolescent's fear of dying and nothingness, which leads him to reject adulthood and its responsibilities as compromises indicating that one has accepted death and (if God does not exist) eventual nothingness. They long for and yet intellectually cannot believe in indestructibility and immortality. Their physical sense of well-being, their bodily development, their bursting with vigor and life only accents their fear of decrepitude, decay and death. They turn to their peer group for solace, to control loneliness and to love people like themselves.
The role religion used to play in helping bridge this kind of impasse by offering hope for an on-going future — an afterlife — is discussed. The formerly valued role of adulthood, of elders, of acquired experience and wisdom has also been discussed in this framework.
The ways in which anxiety, depressive feelings, guilt and hypochondriasis break through has been delineated, as have the denials and some of the defensive preoccupations with ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’, including food fads, physical well-being, fear of poisons, pollution and preservatives.
The intense rage and frustration which adolescents can feel against parents who treated them, when children, as central to all, and who can no longer protect them from the ravages of a threatening and thus ‘bad’ world, has been discussed.