Adolescent Related Quotes

Gross well says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.

So you love me," said Petra softly when the kiss ended. I'm a raging mass of hormones thet I'm too young to understand," said Bean. "You're a female of a closely related species. According to all the best primatologists, I really have no choice." That's nice," she said...

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.

Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life. The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

I spent a considerable amount of time when I was, o, adolescent, wondering why I was different, whether there were other people like me. Why, when everyone else was fascinated by their developing sexual nature, I couldn't give a damn. I've never been attracted to men. Or women. Or anything else. It's difficult to explain, but while I have an apparently normal female body, I don't have any sexual urge or appetite.

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he’d been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill. I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... “Stories aren’t real,” he told me shortly. “They don’t feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding ‘family’ in the nearest gang.” Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. “Write down the names of some books,” she said. “Maybe we’ll read them.” I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young lives. Stories that use the power of myth to speak truth to the human heart. Charles de Lint creates a magical world that’s not off in a distant Neverland but here and now and accessible, formed by the “magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve long lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people from troubled backgrounds say that books by Charles saved them in their youth, and kept them going. Recently I saw that parole officer again, and I asked after his work. “Gets harder every year,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He stopped me as I turned to go. “That writer? That Charles de Lint? My wife got me to read them books…. Sometimes I pass them to the kids.” “Do they like them?” I asked him curiously. “If I can get them to read, they do. I tell them: Stories are important.” And then he looked at me and smiled.

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Nickerson began to understand, as only an adolescent on the verge of adulthood can understand, that the carefree days of childhood were gone forever: “Then it was that I, for the first time, realized that I was alone upon a wide and an unfeeling world . . . without one relative or friend to bestow one kind word upon me.

What fascinates me in dreams is the idea that they emanate from our subconscious. I think that there are many possibilities to interpret dreams but a great deal of mystery always remains. When a dream is explained to us, it’s necessary to know the personal context of the subject. For example, what his childhood was like, his adolescence, his interpersonal relations. You’ve got to understand all these elements in order to tally up the dream and to decode it. At the cinema, that can’t happen because the approach demands the introduction of too many elements. In order for viewers to identify with this dream, I chose a parade which makes one think automatically of other common dreams and unconscious states. There are very old characters like objects that are discarded by people today or religious symbols that people have forgotten. I think that even nowadays, people have forgotten the importance of dreams.

Children and adolescents, being relatively new to life, are naturally creative because they haven't been brainwashed, so to speak, by the conventional attitudes of society. Consequently, students are always coming up with novel images, words, and actions that my delight, enlighten, or inspire adults....Creativity has not been the subject of intense focus, extensive research, or high levels of funding in American education.

Nietzsche’s words that relate to this with respect to masks and the processes of life. He speaks of three stages in the life of the spirit incarnate in each of us. Three transformations of the spirit, he calls it. The first is that of the camel which gets down on its knees and asks, “Put a load on me.” That’s the period of these dear little children. This is the just-born life that has come in and is receiving the imprint of the society. The primary mask. “Put a load on me. Teach me what I must know to live in this society.” Once heavily loaded, the camel struggles to its feet and goes out into the desert — into the desert of the realization of its own individual nature. This must follow the reception of the culture good. It must not precede it. First is humility, and obedience, and the reception of the primary mask. Then comes the turning inward, which happens automatically in adolescence, to find your own inward life. Nietzsche calls this the transformation of the camel into a lion. Then the lion attacks a dragon; and the dragon’s name is Thou Shalt. The dragon is the concretization of all those imprints that the society has put upon you. The function of the lion is to kill the dragon Thou Shalt. On every scale is a “Thou Shalt,” some of them dating from 2000 b.c., others from this morning’s newspaper. And, when the dragon Thou Shalt has been killed — that is to say, when you have made the transition from simple obedience to authority over your own life — the third transformation is to that of being a child moving spontaneously out of the energy of its own center. Nietzsche calls it a wheel rolling out of its own center.

The challenge to which these two groups responded was the interdependence of human kind, North and South, Rich and Pool, Industrialised and Rural, in the aftermath of the Second World War. To the United World College group it called for the establishment of a new kind of school where young people of all nations and backgrounds could live and learn together at the most formative period of their adolescence and so form those ties of friendship and understanding that would last them through their lives

adolescents have a less rational version of an adult brain, one that takes more risks and has relatively poor decision-making skills.

It is mad for adolescents to rage at parents who have done their best, but it is a conventional madness, uniform enough so that we tolerate it relatively unquestioningly.

He stopped speaking then. I think my eyes might have glazed over – as is the right of any adolescent when an older relative starts reminiscing about their youth.

The longing to belong and to be prized by one's peers permeates childhood and adolescence and can be compelling and anxiety provoking at any time in life, as the common dread of cocktail parties in adulthood attests. This need -- as old and as potent as erotic desire -- is a fundamental part of being human; according to object relations theory, we become ourselves by being recognized and loved by others.

While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.

Thus we arrive at the problem of the relation of religion to the negation of sexual desire. Sexual debility results in a lowering of self-confidence. In one case it is compensated by the brutalization of sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, in the other by rigid character traits. The compulsion to control one's sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honor and duty, bravery and self-control. But the pathology and emotionality of these psychic attitudes are strongly at variance with the reality of one's personal behavior. The man who attains genital satisfaction, is honorable, responsible, brave, and controlled, without making much of a fuss about it. These attitudes are an organic part of his personality. The man whose genitals are weakened, whose sexual structure is full of contradictions, must continually remind himself to control his sexuality, to preserve his sexual dignity, to be brave in the face of temptation, etc. The struggle to resist the temptation to masturbate is a struggle that is experienced by every adolescent and every child, without exception. All the elements of the reactionary man's structure are developed in this struggle. It is in the lower middle classes that this structure is reinforced most strongly and embedded most deeply. Every form of mysticism derives it's most active energy and, in part, also it's content from this compulsory suppression of sexuality.

Osama bin Laden’s ideas were neither new nor compelling outside his relatively small circle of followers. They belonged to an ugly cul-de-sac of history, an era where witches and heretics were burned in town squares. They were adolescent ideas, in that they remained willfully ignorant of all that had come before. There are many who choose to believe that certain ancient texts are literally the word of one God or the other, but not many who would go so far as to regard as a sacred duty the slaughter of those who disagree with them, or to kill in order to advance their aims. This was a philosophy that would never appeal to more than a few dedicated fanatics. But one of the peculiarities of the modern world is that, because of telecommunications, small groups of like-minded people, even if widely scattered, can form a community of belief. They can feed off of each other, and can come to wield influence far beyond their actual numbers or appeal. Bin Laden’s was the first to use these tools to build his network into a deadly force.

The tallest adults are the ones who had the most childhood and adolescent growth before puberty started; puberty typically tacks on a standard nine inches, and then the game's over. "The children who are going to be the biggest adults are those who are tall by age one or two, and have a relatively late puberty," says Rosenfeld.

Girls may be suffering more than boys [mental illnesses] because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.

CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)

I have none of the sense of decorum, the modesty, or the pessimism of my relatives, and none of their fear of what people will say, of extravagance, or of God. I don’t speak or write apologetically, instead I’m rather grandiloquent, and I like attracting attention. That is, I simply am as I am today, after a lot of living. In my childhood I was a strange little insect; in adolescence, a shy mouse—for many years my nickname was Laucha, which was what we called our ordinary household mice—and in my youthful years I was everything from a rabid feminist to a flower-crowned hippie. My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else’s. In short, a disaster. If I lived in Chile no one would speak to me. But one thing I am is hospitable.

The cause of this state of affair is undoubtedly complex. In my Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (2011), I argue that the challenge to truth comes from three complementary sources: (l) increased knowledge about the wide range of cultures around the globe, many of which hold apparently incompatible views about the world; (2) the postmodern critique of such traditional notions as truth, according to which claims to truth are seen as simple assertions of power; and (3) the human tendency, particularly during adolescence and early adulthood, to adopt relativistic stances (“you’ve got the right to your opinion, just like I have the right to my opinion”). Whatever the relative contributions of these and other factors, it seems clear that leadership becomes more difficult when everyone’s story is considered equally valid, independent of corroborating evidence.

I have never hated anything as much as I hated being a teenager. I could not have been more ill-suited to the state of adolescence. I was desperate to be an adult; desperate to be taken seriously. I hated relying on anyone for anything. I'd have sooner cleaned floors than be given pocket money or walked three miles in the rain at night than be given a lift home by a parent. I was looking up the price of one-bedroom flats in Camden when I was fifteen, so I could get a head start on saving up with my babysitting money. I was using my mum's recipes and dining table to host 'dinner parties' at the same age, forcing my friends round for rosemary roast chicken tagliatelle and raspberry pavlova with a Frank Sinatra soundtrack, when all they wanted to was eat burgers and go bowling. I wanted my own friends, my own schedule, my own home, my own money and my own life. I found being a teenager one big, frustrating, mortifying, exposing, co-dependent embarrassment that couldn't end fast enough. Alcohol, I think, was my small act of independence. It was the one way I could feel like an adult.

Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time.   UNFORTUNATELY,

As a result of the experience of consistent parental love and caring throughout childhood, such fortunate children will enter adulthood not only with a deep internal sense of their own value but also with a deep internal sense of security. All children are terrified of abandonment, and with good reason. This fear of abandonment begins around the age of six months, as soon as the child is able to perceive itself to be an individual, separate from its parents. For with this perception of itself as an individual comes the realization that as an individual it is quite helpless, totally dependent and totally at the mercy of its parents for all forms of sustenance and means of survival. To the child, abandonment by its parents is the equivalent of death. Most parents, even when they are otherwise relatively ignorant or callous, are instinctively sensitive to their children’s fear of abandonment and will therefore, day in and day out, hundreds and thousands of times, offer their children needed reassurance: “You know Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to leave you behind”; “Of course Mommy and Daddy will come back to get you”; “Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to forget about you.” If these words are matched by deeds, month in and month out, year in and year out, by the time of adolescence the child will have lost the fear of abandonment and in its stead will have a deep inner feeling that the world is a safe place in which to be and protection will be there when it is needed. With this internal sense of the consistent safety of the world, such a child is free to delay gratification of one kind or another, secure in the knowledge that the opportunity for gratification, like home and parents, is always there, available when needed.

The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de

At last it dawned on me that the differences between us were not really simply because he was Russian and I American. Sure, we were having trouble with cultural differences. But it was our versions of evil that really differed--evil in relation to God and man, not evil in relation to sociology or socialism. Russians and Americans couldn't have been more diametrically opposed in relation to hope and the future. And the Bolshevik Revolution hadn't that much to do with it. But it was just too easy to say the Russian soul was imprinted with the need to suffer. Nor was it true that the American soul was imprinted with an adolescent naïveté causing enthusiasm and optimism to spring eternal.

Coopersmith’s study with adolescent boys indicates that children develop self-trust, adventuresomeness and the ability to deal with adversity if they are treated with respect and are provided with well-defined standards of values, demands for competence and guidance toward solutions of problems. The development of individual self-reliance is fostered by a well-structured, demanding environment, rather than by largely unlimited permissiveness and freedom to explore in an unfocused way. The research of both Stanley Coopersmith and Morris Rosenberg has led them to believe that pupils with high self-esteem perceive themselves as successful. They are relatively free of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms, and can realistically assess their abilities. They are confident that their efforts will meet with success, while being fully aware of their limitations. Persons with high self-esteem are outgoing and socially successful and expect to be well received. They accept others and others tend to accept them. On the other hand, according to Coopersmith and Rosenberg, pupils with low self-esteem are easily discouraged and sometimes depressed. They feel isolated, unloved and unlovable. They seem incapable of expressing themselves or defending their inadequacies. They are so preoccupied with their self-consciousness and anxiety that their capacity for self-fulfillment can be easily destroyed.4

EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F———.' RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.' RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.' RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then.' EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.

that? Masculinity is and was a broad category that encompassed many forms of behaviour; the manliness of these particular men was inflected by identities of class, ethnicity and profession. Yet it is striking how often the key protagonists appealed to pointedly masculine modes of comportment and how closely these were interwoven with their understanding of policy. ‘I sincerely trust we shall keep our backs very stiff in this matter,’ Arthur Nicolson wrote to his friend Charles Hardinge, recommending that London reject any appeals for rapprochement from Berlin.156 It was essential, the German ambassador in Paris, Wilhelm von Schoen wrote in March 1912, that the Berlin government maintain a posture of ‘completely cool calmness’ in its relations with France and approach ‘with cold blood’ the tasks of national defence imposed by the international situation.157 When Bertie spoke of the danger that the Germans would ‘push us into the water and steal our clothes’, he metaphorized the international system as a rural playground thronging with male adolescents. Sazonov praised the ‘uprightness’ of Poincaré’s character and ‘the unshakable firmness of his will’;158 Paul Cambon saw in him the ‘stiffness’ of the professional jurist, while the allure of the reserved and self-reliant ‘outdoorsman’ was central to Grey’s identity as a public man. To have shrunk from supporting Austria-Hungary during the crisis of 1914, Bethmann commented in his memoirs, would have been an act of ‘self-castration’.

After the dedication, Eleanor saw Bernard privately, probably at her own request. He came prepared to offer more spiritual comfort, thinking that she too might be suffering qualms of conscience over Vitry, but he was surprised to learn that she was not. Nevertheless, several matters were indeed troubling her, not the least the problems of her sister. She asked him to use his influence with the Pope to have the excommunication on Raoul and Petronilla lifted and their marriage recognised by the Church. In return, she would persuade Louis to make peace with Theobald of Champagne and recognise Pierre de la Chatre as Archbishop of Bourges. Bernard was appalled at her brazen candour. In his opinion, these affairs were no business of a twenty-two-year-old woman. He was, in fact, terrified of women and their possible effects on him. An adolescent, first experiencing physical desire for a young girl, he had been so filled with self-disgust that he had jumped into a freezing cold pond & remained there until his erection subsided. He strongly disapproved of his sister, who had married a rich man; because she enjoyed her wealth, he thought of her as a whore, spawned by Satan to lure her husband from the paths of righteousness, and refused to have anything to do with her. Nor would he allow his monks any contact with their female relatives. Now there stood before him the young, worldly, and disturbingly beautiful Queen of France, intent upon meddling in matters that were not her concern. Bernard's worst suspicions were confirmed: here, beyond doubt, was the source of that "Counsel of the Devil" that had urged the King on to disaster and plunged him into sin and guilt. His immediate reaction was to admonish Eleanor severely.

The strongest evidence yet was published in 2010. In a painstaking long-term study, much larger and more thorough than anything done previously, an international team of researchers tracked one thousand children in New Zealand from birth until the age of thirty-two. Each child’s self-control was rated in a variety of ways (through observations by researchers as well as in reports of problems from parents, teachers, and the children themselves). This produced an especially reliable measure of children’s self-control, and the researchers were able to check it against an extraordinarily wide array of outcomes through adolescence and into adulthood. The children with high self-control grew up into adults who had better physical health, including lower rates of obesity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and even healthier teeth. (Apparently, good self-control includes brushing and flossing.) Self-control was irrelevant to adult depression, but its lack made people more prone to alcohol and drug problems. The children with poor self-control tended to wind up poorer financially. They worked in relatively low-paying jobs, had little money in the bank, and were less likely to own a home or have money set aside for retirement. They also grew up to have more children being raised in single-parent households, presumably because they had a harder time adapting to the discipline required for a long-term relationship. The children with good self-control were much more likely to wind up in a stable marriage and raise children in a two-parent home. Last, but certainly not least, the children with poor self-control were more likely to end up in prison. Among those with the lowest levels of self-control, more than 40 percent had a criminal conviction by the age of thirty-two, compared with just 12 percent of the people who had been toward the high end of the self-control distribution in their youth.

The sex ratio of those being referred had shifted dramatically too. The number of girls (known at that time at GIDS as ‘natal females’, now ‘birth-assigned females’) seeking help had equalled the number of boys for the first time in 2011. Previously, GIDS’s caseload had been nearly three-quarters male for those referred in childhood, or two-thirds overall. At first, this change was understood to be positive – a sort of balancing-out – and attributed to the fact that the girls were perhaps being better supported to seek help. But by 2015 it was clear that, in fact, something bigger was happening. There had been a complete reversal. Referrals for natal girls made up 65 percent of the total. In 2019/20 girls outnumbered boys by a ratio of six to one in some age groups, most markedly between the ages of 12 and 14 … Moreover, the majority were girls whose gender-related distress had begun after the onset of puberty, during adolescence. They didn’t have a history of childhood dysphoria.

Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you've found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It's just growing pains. One can't jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean-anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul--only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.

We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ according to time and place, and that it would be wise to show our historic learning by at once discarding the moral customs of our group. A little anthropology is a dangerous thing. [...] Social order is none the less necessary; the game must still have rules in order to be played; men must know what to expect of one another in the ordinary circumstances of life. Hence the unanimity with which the members of a society practise its moral code is quite as important as the contents of that code. Our heroic rejection of the customs and morals of our tribe, upon our adolescent discovery of their relativity, betrays the immaturity of our minds; given another decade and we begin to understand that there may be more wisdom in the moral code of the group—the formulated experience of generations of the race—than can be explained in a college course. Sooner or later the disturbing realization comes to us that even that which we cannot understand may be true.

They never thought about their age, was a common reply; they had once been adolescents, then they were thirty, fifty, sixty, and never gave it a thought, so why should they do so now? Some of them were very restricted, finding it hard to walk or move, and yet there was nowhere they wanted to go. Others were absentminded, confused, or forgetful, but this worried their carers and relatives more than it did them. Catherine Hope insisted that the residents of the second and third levels remain active, and it was Irina’s job to keep them interested, entertained, and connected. “However old one is, we need a goal in our lives. It’s the best cure for many ills,” Cathy insisted. In her case, the goal had always been to help others, and her accident had not altered this in the slightest. On Friday mornings, Irina used to accompany the most active residents on their street protests, to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. She also took part in the vigils for noble causes and in the knitting club; all the women who could wield a pair of needles (apart from Alma Belasco) were knitting

to be open and straightforward about their needs for attention in a social setting. It is equally rare for members of a group in American culture to honestly and openly express needs that might be in conflict with that individual’s needs. This value of not just honestly but also openly fully revealing the true feelings and needs present in the group is vital for it’s members to feel emotional safe. It is also vital to keeping the group energy up and for giving the feedback that allows it’s members to know themselves, where they stand in relation to others and for spiritual/psychological growth. Usually group members will simply not object to an individual’s request to take the floor—but then act out in a passive-aggressive manner, by making noise or jokes, or looking at their watches. Sometimes they will take the even more violent and insidious action of going brain-dead while pasting a jack-o’-lantern smile on their faces. Often when someone asks to read something or play a song in a social setting, the response is a polite, lifeless “That would be nice.” In this case, N.I.C.E. means “No Integrity or Congruence Expressed” or “Not Into Communicating Emotion.” So while the sharer is exposing his or her vulnerable creation, others are talking, whispering to each other, or sitting looking like they are waiting for the dental assistant to tell them to come on back. No wonder it’s so scary to ask for people’s attention. In “nice” cultures, you are probably not going to get a straight, open answer. People let themselves be oppressed by someone’s request—and then blame that someone for not being psychic enough to know that “Yes” meant “No.” When were we ever taught to negotiate our needs in relation to a group of people? In a classroom? Never! The teacher is expected to take all the responsibility for controlling who gets heard, about what, and for how long. There is no real opportunity to learn how to nonviolently negotiate for the floor. The only way I was able to pirate away a little of the group’s attention in the school I attended was through adolescent antics like making myself fart to get a few giggles, or asking the teacher questions like, “Why do they call them hemorrhoids and not asteroids?” or “If a number two pencil is so popular, why is it still number two,” or “What is another word for thesaurus?” Some educational psychologists say that western culture schools are designed to socialize children into what is really a caste system disguised as a democracy. And in once sense it is probably good preparation for the lack of true democratic dynamics in our culture’s daily living. I can remember several bosses in my past reminding me “This is not a democracy, this is a job.” I remember many experiences in social groups, church groups, and volunteer organizations in which the person with the loudest voice, most shaming language, or outstanding skills for guilting others, controlled the direction of the group. Other times the pain and chaos of the group discussion becomes so great that people start begging for a tyrant to take charge. Many times people become so frustrated, confused and anxious that they would prefer the order that oppression brings to the struggle that goes on in groups without “democracy skills.” I have much different experiences in groups I work with in Europe and in certain intentional communities such as the Lost Valley Educational Center in Eugene, Oregon, where the majority of people have learned “democracy skills.” I can not remember one job, school, church group, volunteer organization or town meeting in mainstream America where “democracy skills” were taught or practiced.

I want to end here with the most common and least understood sexual problem. So ordinary is this problem, so likely are you to suffer from it, that it usually goes unnoticed. It doesn't even have a name. The writer Robertson Davies dubs it acedia. “Acedia” used to be reckoned a sin, one of the seven deadly sins, in fact. Medieval theologians translated it as “sloth,” but it is not physical torpor that makes acedia so deadly. It is the torpor of the soul, the indifference that creeps up on us as we age and grow accustomed to those we love, that poisons so much of adult life. As we fight our way out of the problems of adolescence and early adulthood, we often notice that the defeats and setbacks that troubled us in our youth are no longer as agonizing. This comes as welcome relief, but it has a cost. Whatever buffers us from the turmoil and pain of loss also buffers us from feeling joy. It is easy to mistake the indifference that creeps over us with age and experience for the growth of wisdom. Indifference is not wisdom. It is acedia. The symptom of this condition that concerns me is the waning of sexual attraction that so commonly comes between lovers once they settle down with each other. The sad fact is that the passionate attraction that so consumed them when they first courted dies down as they get to know each other well. In time, it becomes an ember; often, an ash. Within a few years, the sexual passion goes out of most marriages, and many partners start to look elsewhere to rekindle this joyous side of life. This is easy to do with a new lover, but acedia will not be denied, and the whole cycle happens again. This is the stuff of much of modern divorce, and this is the sexual disorder you are most likely to experience call it a disorder because it meets the defining criterion of a disorder: like transsexuality or S-M or impotence, it grossly impairs sexual, affectionate relations between two people who used to have them. Researchers and therapists have not seen fit to mount an attack on acedia. You will find it in no one’s nosology, on no foundation's priority list of problems to solve, in no government mental health budget. It is consigned to the innards of women's magazines and to trashy “how to keep your man” paperbacks. Acedia is looked upon with acceptance and indifference by those who might actually discover how it works and how to cure it. It is acedia I wish to single out as the most painful, the most costly, the most mysterious, and the least understood of the sexual disorders. And therefore the most urgent.

Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object ... If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy. In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a � name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.

When studies using mental ability test scores from children are considered, the heritability of mental ability is typically found to be about .40, and the effect of the common or shared environment is found to be almost as strong, about .35. In contrast, when studies using mental ability test scores from adults (or older adolescents) are considered, estimates of the heritability of mental ability are much higher, typically about .65, whereas estimates of common or shared environment effects are much lower, probably under .20 (see review by Haworth et al., 2010). These findings indicate that differences among children in their levels of mental ability are attributable almost as much to their common environment—that is, to features of their family or household circumstances—as to their genetic inheritances. However, the findings also suggest that as children grow up, the differences among them in mental ability become less strongly related to the features of their common environments, and more strongly related to their genetic inheritances. In other words, the effect on one's mental ability of the family or household in which one is reared tends to become less important as one grows up, so that by adulthood one's level of mental ability is heavily dependent on one's genetic characteristics. It is as if one's level of mental ability—relative to that of other persons of the same age—can be raised (or lowered) during childhood by a particularly good (or poor) home environment, but then gradually returns to the level that one's genes tend to produce.

Although in childhood the girl-child may have discovered her clitoris as a source of pleasure, she will enter adolescence convinced that the vagina is her only sexual organ. The vagina becomes the focus of sexual pleasure in a world that reduces sensuality to genital intercourse defined by the needs and desires of men. As a result, the girl-child’s erotic potential will be confined to an activity that requires a partner. An activity that guarantees physical satisfaction for the man. An activity that in and of itself does not guarantee her satisfaction. The very same parents who are “grossed out” by the masturbation of their pre-teen daughters breathe a sigh of relief when those same daughters move away from the clitoris and turn toward the vagina. Groomed to sexually service men, she will forget about her body’s capacity for sensual delight and satisfaction. Her original love of her body, curiosity about its sensations, and exploration of its nooks and crannies is twisted out of shape and labeled unacceptable. The price tags successfully reversed; she becomes dependent on others to meet her erotic needs. Many of our daughters stop touching themselves by adolescence and at the same time lose the affectionate touch of their parents. As they mature and grow out of the "cute stage," adults become uncomfortable with their developing bodies and most touching abruptly stops. The girl-child tries to make sense of this withdrawal of affection. She becomes convinced that something is wrong with her body—that her growing breasts and pubic hair, and the genital sensations she is experiencing make her untouchable to her parents. For some, the incestuous behavior of a parent or relative compounds this growing discomfort.

She told him the origins of the “buck dance,” when “white people would come up and say ‘N____r, dance’, and then start shooting around the feet of blacks so that they would dance like everything.” 45 Big Ma was an important presence in Jimmy’s childhood and adolescence, and he credited her with giving him a unique and powerful sense of historical change. “When she talked about slavery,” he recalled, “she always talked not about how they freed the slaves, but about how [slaveholders] surrendered. There was a big difference. She saw the change as something that had been won by somebody, not something that had been given. She realized that there had been a struggle and that somebody had to lose.” 46 It would not take much for young Jimmy to see a historical connection and a continuity in struggle between these two moments—the buck dance that Big Ma witnessed in her childhood and the marauding Selma sheriff who came to town “shooting and raising Cain to see the colored folks run” during his childhood. Big Ma lived until the mid-1930s, when Jimmy was in his teens. By this time he could see new spaces of struggle emerging from shifts in the region’s economy and black people’s employment patterns. These shifts had impacted his family, specifically through his father’s work opportunities, and would shape his own prospects. Cotton continued to be an important part of the economy, both in the state and in the Black Belt region, but its significance declined relative to Alabama’s growing industrial economy. African Americans saw expanded employment opportunities, as labor shortages, strikes, and union organizing during the first two decades of the century led companies to open up jobs previously unavailable to black workers. The steel industry, which had previously satisfied its need for cheap labor with immigrant workers, came to rely heavily on black labor after World War I. 47

Jung’s remarks about how in North Africa he “felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness” may seem politically incorrect from our oversensitive perspective, but they highlight the core insight of the trip. Although Jung knew a great deal about mythology and mythological thinking, his own thinking was decidedly Western and rational—he described himself as a “thorough Westerner”26—and in many ways, Jung was a typical “left-brainer,” with his detestation of “fantasy,” his formality and punctuality, his precision and need to be “scientific.” In his travels in North Africa, and later Taos and Central Africa, Jung was looking for signs of a consciousness not as differentiated from the unconscious matrix—what in the Seven Sermons he called “the Pleroma”—as ours, with its sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious. What Jung found in places such as Tunis, Sousse, Sfax, and the oasis city of Tozeur was a completely different sense of time. Coming from the land of cuckoo clocks and appointment books, this must have been a shock. Jung had entered a “dream of a static, age-old existence,” a kind of perpetual now, a condition associated with the right brain, which lacks a sense of time; there was none of the incessant activity that characterized even a relatively small city like Zürich. Jung enjoyed the contrast, which gave him an opportunity to entertain criticisms of modernity, a practice that would become something of a habit in later years, but he also felt this timelessness was threatened. Thinking of his pocket watch, “the symbol of Europe’s accelerated tempo,” Jung worried that the “god of time” and its demon, progress, would soon “chop into bits and pieces”—hours, minutes, seconds—the “duration” he sensed here and which was the “closest thing to eternity.

The First World War legitimized violence to a degree that not even Bismarck’s wars of unification in 1864-70 had been able to do. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence.152 After 1918, however, things were entirely different. The changed climate could already be observed in parliamentary proceedings. These had remained relatively decorous under the Empire, but after 1918 they degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches, with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order. Far worse, however, was the situation on the streets, where all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. Those who carried out these acts of violence were not only former soldiers, but also included men in their late teens and twenties who had been too young to fight in the war themselves and for whom civil violence became a way of legitimizing themselves in the face of the powerful myth of the older generation of front-soldiers.153 Not untypical was the experience of the young Raimund Pretzel, child of a well-to-do senior civil servant, who remembered later that he and his schoolfriends played war games all the time from 1914 to 1918, followed battle reports with avid interest, and with his entire generation ‘experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that’, he added in the 1930s,‘has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.’154 War, armed conflict, violence and death were often for them abstract concepts, killing something they had read about and had processed in their adolescent minds under the influence of a propaganda that presented it as a heroic, necessary, patriotic act.155

The only thing I knew about pickups was this: growing up, I always inwardly mocked the couples I saw who drove around in them. The girl would be sitting in the middle seat right next to the boy, and the boy’s right arm would be around her shoulders, and his left arm would be on the wheel. I’m not sure why, but there was something about my golf course upbringing that had always caused me to recoil at this sight. Why is she sitting in the middle seat? I’d wonder. Why is it important that they press against each other as they drive down the road? Can’t they wait until they get home? I looked at it as a sign of weakness--something pitiable. They need to get a life may have even crossed my mind once or twice, as if their specific brand of public affection was somehow directly harming me. But that’s what happens to people who, by virtue of the geography of their childhood, are deprived of the opportunity to ride in pickup trucks. They become really, really judgmental about otherwise benign things. Still, every now and then, as Marlboro Man showed me the beauty of the country in his white Ford F250, I couldn’t help but wonder…had he been one of those boys in high school? I knew he’d had a serious girlfriend back in his teenage years. Julie. A beautiful girl and the love of his adolescent life, in the same way Kev had been mine. And I wondered: had Julie scooched over to the middle seat when Marlboro Man picked her up every Friday night? Had he hooked his right arm around her neck, and had she then reached her left hand up and clasped his right hand with hers? Had they then dragged Main in this position? Our hometowns had been only forty miles apart; maybe he’d brought her to my city to see a movie. Was it remotely possible I’d actually seen Marlboro Man and Julie riding around in his pickup, sitting side by side? Was it possible this man, this beautiful, miraculous, perfect man who’d dropped so magically into my life, had actually been one of the innocent recipients of my intolerant, shallow pickup-related condemnation? And if he had done it, was it something he’d merely grown out of? How come I wasn’t riding around in his middle seat? Was I supposed to initiate this? Was this expected of me? Because I probably should know early on. But wouldn’t he have gestured in that direction if he’d wanted me to move over and sit next to him? Maybe, just maybe, he’d liked those girls better than he liked me. Maybe they’d had a closeness that warranted their riding side by side in a pickup, a closeness that he and I just don’t share? Please don’t let that be the reason. I don’t like that reason. I had to ask him. I had to know.

Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.

Burbank's power of love, reported Hall, "greater than any other, was a subtle kind of nourishment that made everything grow better and bear fruit more abundantly. Burbank explained to me that in all his experimentation he took plants into his confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held their small lives in deepest regard and affection." Helen Keller, deaf and blind, after a visit to Burbank, wrote in Out­ look for the Blind: "He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. When plants talk to him, he listens. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees." Her observation was particularly apt since all his life Burbank loved children. In his essay "Training of the Human Plant," later published as a book, he an­ticipated the more humane attitudes of a later day and shocked authori­tarian parents by saying, "It is more important for a child to have a good nervous system than to try to 'force' it along the line of book knowledge at the expense of its spontaneity, its play. A child should learn through a medium of pleasure, not of pain. Most of the things that are really useful in later life come to the children through play and through association with nature." Burbank, like other geniuses, realized that his successes came from having conserved the exuberance of a small boy and his wonder for everything around him. He told one of his biographers: 'Tm almost seventy-seven, and I can still go over a gate or run a foot race or kick the chandelier. That's because my body is no older than my mind-and my mind is adolescent. It has never grown up and I hope it never will." It was this quality which so puzzled the dour scientists who looked askance at his power of creation and bedeviled audiences who expected him to be explicit as to how he produced so many horticultural wonders. Most of them were as disappointed as the members of the American Pomological Society, gathered to hear Burbank tell "all" during a lecture entitled "How to Produce New Fruits and Flowers," who sat agape as they heard him say: In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of nature, whether relating to the life, growth, structure and movements of a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the psychological movements of the human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can become one of nature's interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world. Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must be laid aside. Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She conveys her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these truths as suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole universe in harmony with us. At last man has found a solid foundation for science, having discovered that he is part of a universe which is eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.

PATTERNS OF THE “SHY” What else is common among people who identify themselves as “shy?” Below are the results of a survey that was administered to 150 of my program’s participants. The results of this informal survey reveal certain facts and attitudes common among the socially anxious. Let me point out that these are the subjective answers of the clients themselves—not the professional opinions of the therapists. The average length of time in the program for all who responded was eight months. The average age was twenty-eight. (Some of the answers are based on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest.) -Most clients considered shyness to be a serious problem at some point in their lives. Almost everyone rated the seriousness of their problem at level 5, which makes sense, considering that all who responded were seeking help for their problem. -60 percent of the respondents said that “shyness” first became enough of a problem that it held them back from things they wanted during adolescence; 35 percent reported the problem began in childhood; and 5 percent said not until adulthood. This answer reveals when clients were first aware of social anxiety as an inhibiting force. -The respondents perceived the average degree of “sociability” of their parents was a 2.7, which translates to “fair”; 60 percent of the respondents reported that no other member of the family had a problem with “shyness”; and 40 percent said there was at least one other family member who had a problem with “shyness.” -50 percent were aware of rejection by their peers during childhood. -66 percent had physical symptoms of discomfort during social interaction that they believed were related to social anxiety. -55 percent reported that they had experienced panic attacks. -85 percent do not use any medication for anxiety; 15 percent do. -90 percent said they avoid opportunities to meet new people; 75 percent acknowledged that they often stay home because of social fears, rather than going out. -80 percent identified feelings of depression that they connected to social fears. -70 percent said they had difficulty with social skills. -75 percent felt that before they started the program it was impossible to control their social fears; 80 percent said they now believed it was possible to control their fears. -50 percent said they believed they might have a learning disability. -70 percent felt that they were “too dependent on their parents”; 75 percent felt their parents were overprotective; 50 percent reported that they would not have sought professional help if not for their parents’ urging. -10 percent of respondents were the only child in their families; 40 percent had one sibling; 30 percent had two siblings; 10 percent had three; and 10 percent had four or more. Experts can play many games with statistics. Of importance here are the general attitudes and patterns of a population of socially anxious individuals who were in a therapy program designed to combat their problem. Of primary significance is the high percentage of people who first thought that “shyness” was uncontrollable, but then later changed their minds, once they realized that anxiety is a habit that can be broken—without medication. Also significant is that 50 percent of the participants recognized that their parents were the catalyst for their seeking help. Consider these statistics and think about where you fit into them. Do you identify with this profile? Look back on it in the coming months and examine the ways in which your sociability changes. Give yourself credit for successful breakthroughs, and keep in mind that you are not alone!

Agnete had walked over to one of the taller works, the school of fish, and fingered a small piece of metal slightly darker than the others, its shape not quite symmetrical as the rest of the pieces swimming through the air in swirling, upward drifts. Upon closer scrutiny, Stephen saw she had changed the spacing of this one piece of metal in relation to the others, as well as the weight of it. When the wind blew, it did not move in the same pattern as the rest; instead, it twitched and wavered in a way that suggested it was swimming harder, against the tide, in an effort to catch up. "I'm that fish," she said. "I grew up in this house. It's the only place I've ever lived, and I love it here. But everyone in town knew that Therese, even though she raised me, wasn't my mother. Everyone knew that whoever my father was, he wasn't around. I survived adolescence by convincing myself I didn't care; I told myself being different didn't make me any less." She pulled her hair away from her face, and Stephen was struck by the resemblance to her father. He could feel Bayber's hand, an iron clamp squeezing his wrist. Her father, had he been around, would likely have scared away anyone brave enough to come within five feet of Agnete. "I made this piece because I've always had a feeling of being separated from everyone else, which I was fine with, but at the same time, a fear of being left behind. Does that make sense?" Her explanation resonated with him, though he'd have been hard-pressed to articulate it as clearly. He'd stared at the ground, scowling in concentration, unable to say more than "Yes, I understand what you mean. Maybe I'm that fish, as well." "Then there are two of us. We'll be our own school.

There is, as a legion of morose poets well know, nothing inconsequential about love. Nor all those peculiarities of related appetites often confused for love, for example lust, possession, amorous worship, appalling notions of abject surrender where one’s own will is bled out in sacrifice, obsessions of the fetishistic sort that might include earlobes or toenails or regurgitated foodstuffs, and indeed that adolescent competitiveness which in adults—adults who should of course know better but don’t—is manifested as insane jealousy.

I know that no matter how liberal or progressive I profess to be, no matter how successfully, how diligently I seek to be enlightened and nuanced in my understanding of the world and those around me, I know that there still is a tiny, virulent nugget, a germ of prejudice that exists deep within me — the product of those stereotypes and awful jokes of childhood and adolescence, and that it must always be powerfully held at bay by reason, understanding and love.

This portion of the chapter is directed at those of you whose son or daughter or other relative is in denial about his or her social life. No matter what your relationship is to this person, you need to tell yourself—daily, if necessary—that it is okay to want this person to become independent. Right now, the person is a burden to you. It is not selfish of you to want to lessen the burden of being the sole emotional support of someone else. It is selfish of the other person to ask you to be that support. But you have every right to try to foster, nurture, even at times force a healthy independence. There is an old saying that you may want to keep in mind as you proceed: “It is better to teach someone to fish than to fish for him.” It is better, much better, to give someone the courage, strength, and skills to become socially independent than to be that person’s entire social world. You’ll feel better. And the person you care about will ultimately feel better too. The No. 1 piece of advice that I give parents who want to help their adolescent or adult child is this: Use your influence to help your child face up to his or her anxiety. It need not be done all at once. I’m not suggesting you walk your child to the mouth of the volcano and leave him there, but you need to be the one who never falters. Your child, who suffers anxiety in social situations, will inevitably backslide from time to time. His improvement will be steady, but it will not be constant. So you have to be there to provide firm support and active, vocal encouragement throughout his journey to socialization. What I am asking you to do is nurture your child’s independence. Do not rescue him from what he fears. Do not confuse nurturing—saying to him, “I know you are afraid, but do the best you can because I believe you can succeed”—with rescuing, saying, “I know you are afraid, so I’ll call and cancel your plans and maybe you can attend that club meeting another time when you’re more ready.” Do not confuse teaching him to fish with fishing for him.

ELECTIVE MUTISM Social anxiety appears in many forms, some of which are only now coming to light. Socially anxious children, for example, are usually thought of as quiet and reserved and of course “shy.” But some children, though they function fairly well in their home environment, have great difficulty talking in social situations. Donny was one such child. At fourteen, he managed quite well at home, but never talked to his peers. His parents encouraged him to join in group activities, and even sent him off to an overnight camp. But he remained silent, even when he became lost in the woods. The child was alone for several hours; dusk was approaching, and he began to get cold, but he still could not bring himself to call out. The counselors were near enough for him to attract their attention and yet he remained mute. Alarm bells went off for Melanie when she noticed that her daughter at age three had trouble talking with people outside their home. When the little girl went to see Santa Claus, and he asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she became hysterical and couldn’t respond verbally. And the problem continued: She would speak only with the immediate family, and never to peers or potential playmates. Elective mutism is a very specific symptom of social anxiety. Fear turns into panic which inhibits speech; the elective mute is capable—physically—of speaking to outsiders, but anxiety prevents him or her from speaking. Only recently has there been any media attention paid to this syndrome, and research in this area has just begun. After an article appeared in a New York-area newspaper, however, someone who had expressed interest in starting a self-help group for elective mutes was besieged with phone calls from desperate relatives, eager to get help for their silent family members. I have worked with people of all ages who suffer from varying degrees of elective mutism. From my perspective, elective mutism is treatable relatively easily in childhood or early adolescence. But treating the adult is very difficult because of the pervasive progression of the problem.

Adolescent Warning Signs Lack of peer relationships outside the family Anxiety in social situations Difficulty with social skills such as keeping a conversation going Depression, withdrawal Confusion Sexual identity problems Interpersonal problems—trouble interacting with people Sleep problems, including excessive sleeping Stress-related physical symptoms Feelings of persecution Family conflicts Antisocial attitudes Overdependence on TV, computer, or video games Using subjective symptoms as a way of avoiding responsibilities Procrastination Fear of groups Lack of planning or organization Difficulty with self-expression Feelings of loneliness Physical complaints Difficulty making and keeping friends; stormy relationships with peers Fear of new situations Rationalization about lack of social life Learning disabilities

Adam: Adam was a young man whose anxiety turned into a monster. Where Shelly had a very mild case of social anxiety, Adam’s case could only be called severe. Over a period of several years, his underlying social fears developed into a full-blown school phobia. A quiet, unassuming person, Adam had never stood out in the classroom. Through elementary school and on into high school, he neither excelled nor failed his subjects. By no means a discipline problem, the “shy” Adam kept to himself and seldom talked in class, whether to answer a teacher’s question or chat with his buddies. In fact, he really had no friends, and the only peers he socialized with were his cousins, whom he saw at weekly family gatherings. Though he watched the other kids working together on projects or playing sports together, Adam never approached them to join in. Maybe they wouldn’t let him, he thought. Maybe he wasn’t good enough. Being rejected was not a chance he was willing to take. Adam never tried hard in school either. If he didn’t understand something, he kept quiet, fearful that raising his hand would bring ridicule. When he did poorly on an exam or paper, it only confirmed to him what he was sure was true: He didn’t measure up. He became so apprehensive about his tests that he began to feel physically ill at the thought of each approaching reminder of his inadequacy. Even though he had studied hard for a math test, for example, he could barely bring himself to get out of bed on the morning it was to take place. His parents, who thought of their child as a reserved but obedient boy who would eventually grow out of this awkward adolescent stage, did not pressure him. Adam was defensive and withdrawn, overwrought by the looming possibility that he would fail. For the two class periods preceding the math test, Adam’s mind was awash with geometry theorems, and his stomach churning. As waves of nausea washed over him, he began to salivate and swallowed hard. His eyes burned and he closed them, wishing he could block the test from his mind. When his head started to feel heavy and he became short of breath, he asked for a hall pass and headed for the bathroom. Alone, he let his anxiety overtake him as he stared into the mirror, letting the cool water flow from the faucet and onto his sweaty palms. He would feel better, he thought, if he could just throw up. But even when he forced his finger down his throat, there was no relief. His dry heaves made him feel even weaker. He slumped to the cold tile and began to cry. Adam never went back to math class that day; instead, he got a pass from the nurse and went straight home. Of course, the pressure Adam was feeling was not just related to the math test. The roots of his anxiety went much deeper. Still, the physical symptoms of anxiety became so debilitating that he eventually quit going to school altogether. Naturally, his parents were extremely concerned but also uncertain what to do. It took almost a year before Adam was sufficiently in control of his symptoms to return to school.

Children displaced from their families, unconnected to their teachers, and not yet mature enough to relate to one another as separate beings, automatically regroup to satisfy their instinctive drive for attachment. The culture of the group is either invented or borrowed from the peer culture at large. It does not take children very long to know what tribe they belong to, what the rules are, whom they can talk to, and whom they must keep at a distance. Despite our attempts to teach our children respect for individual differences and to instill in them a sense of belonging to a cohesive civilization, we are fragmenting at an alarming rate into tribal chaos. Our very own children are leading the way. The time we as parents and educators spend trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them. Children nurtured in traditional hierarchies of attachment are not nearly as susceptible to the spontaneous forces of tribalization. The social values we wish to inculcate can be transmitted only across existing lines of attachment. The culture created by peer orientation does not mix well with other cultures. Because peer orientation exists unto itself, so does the culture it creates. It operates much more like a cult than a culture. Immature beings who embrace the culture generated by peer orientation become cut off from people of other cultures. Peer-oriented youth actually glory in excluding traditional values and historical connections. People from differing cultures that have been transmitted vertically retain the capacity to relate to one another respectfully, even if in practice that capacity is often overwhelmed by the historical or political conflicts in which human beings become caught up. Beneath the particular cultural expressions they can mutually recognize the universality of human values and cherish the richness of diversity. Peer-oriented kids are, however, inclined to hang out with one another exclusively. They set themselves apart from those not like them. As our peer-oriented children reach adolescence, many parents find themselves feeling as if their very own children are barely recognizable with their tribal music, clothing, language, rituals, and body decorations. “Tattooing and piercing, once shocking, are now merely generational signposts in a culture that constantly redraws the line between acceptable and disallowed behavior,” a Canadian journalist pointed out in 2003. Many of our children are growing up bereft of the universal culture that produced the timeless creations of humankind: The Bhagavad Gita; the writings of Rumi and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes and Faulkner, or of the best and most innovative of living authors; the music of Beethoven and Mahler; or even the great translations of the Bible. They know only what is current and popular, appreciate only what they can share with their peers. True universality in the positive sense of mutual respect, curiosity, and shared human values does not require a globalized culture created by peer-orientation. It requires psychological maturity — a maturity that cannot result from didactic education, only from healthy development. Only adults can help children grow up in this way. And only in healthy relationships with adult mentors — parents, teachers, elders, artistic, musical and intellectual creators — can children receive their birthright, the universal and age-honored cultural legacy of humankind. Only in such relationships can they fully develop their own capacities for free and individual and fresh cultural expression.

the classroom environment can be a setup for serious stress-related health problems. In a sense, both teachers and their students are “captives”—they can’t leave during class without suffering adverse consequences. Furthermore, the social and emotional dynamics of a room full of children or adolescents can be intense and sometimes chaotic. Under pressure, some students become disruptive, distracted, and even defiant, and teachers may become anxious, frustrated, embarrassed, and hopeless. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why teachers are burning out and students aren’t learning. The stress response is derailing our teaching and our students’ learning.

The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care… Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.

briefly how she had managed to unlock the back door and why she should have seemed so resentful of him. She had, he decided, been musing and had made her way to this particular room for that purpose. Her pose over there by the window had betrayed as much and his sudden appearance breaking into her reflections, had startled her, so that, in a sense, her anger had been counterfeit. He remained standing where she had stood, wondering if she would circle the west wing and appear at the crest of the drive, but when he heard or saw something of her he fell to thinking about women in general and his relations with them in the past. His experience with women had been limited but although technically still a virgin he was not altogether innocent. There had been a very forward fourteen-year-old called Cherry, who had lived in an adjoining house in Croydon, when he came home for school holidays and Cherry had succeeded in bewitching but ultimately terrifying him, for one day when they were larking about in the stable behind her house, she had hinted at the mysterious differences between the sexes and when, blushing, he had encouraged her to elaborate, she had promptly hoisted her skirt and pulled down her long cotton drawers, whereupon he had fled as though the Devil was after him and had never sought her company again, although he watched her closely in church on successive Sundays, expecting any moment to see forked lightning descend on her in the middle of ‘For all the Saints’. Then there had been a little clumsy cuddling at Christmas parties, and after that a flaxen-haired girl called Daphne whom he had mooned over as an adolescent and had thought of a good deal in the Transvaal but now he had almost forgotten what Daphne looked like and had not recalled her name until now. Finally there had been an abortive foray

This South is nothing like the South in which I used to live, with its manicured lawns and gated country clubs. Even that South has changed. Over the years, Nashville has gotten bigger and more complex. The relatively modest, adolescent city in which I was born had grown into an adult with a tailored suit and gym-toned thighs, all glamour and muscle. It is part of the New South. In that South, there is no place for my daydreams. My true South, this South, is old, and deep, well into the belly of the region, far below the Mason-Dixon Line.

When studies using mental ability test scores from children are considered, the heritability of mental ability is typically found to be about .40, and the effect of the common or shared environment is found to be almost as strong, about .35. In contrast, when studies using mental ability test scores from adults (or older adolescents) are considered, estimates of the heritability of mental ability are much higher, typically about .65, whereas estimates of common or shared environment effects are much lower, probably under .20 (see review by Haworth et al., 2010). These findings indicate that differences among children in their levels of mental ability are attributable almost as much to their common environment—that is, to features of their family or household circumstances—as to their genetic inheritances. However, the findings also suggest that as children grow up, the differences among them in mental ability become less strongly related to the features of their common environments, and more strongly related to their genetic inheritances. In other words, the effect on one's mental ability of the family or household in which one is reared tends to become less important as one grows up, so that by adulthood one's level of mental ability is heavily dependent on one's genetic characteristics. It is as if one's level of mental ability—relative to that of other persons of the same age—can be raised (or lowered) during childhood by a particularly good (or poor) home environment, but then gradually returns to the level that one's genes tend to produce. The aforementioned findings are based mainly on samples of participants who belong to the broad middle class of modern Western countries. There is some evidence, though, that the heritability of IQ tends to be somewhat lower (at least until young adulthood, and perhaps beyond) when studies are conducted using participants of less enriched environments, such as those in economically underdeveloped countries or in the lowest socioeconomic classes of some Western countries (see review by Nisbett et al., 2012). One recent study (Tucker-Drob & Bates, 2016) found that in the United States, additive genetic influences had a weaker influence on IQ among persons of low socioeconomic status than among persons of high socioeconomic status. (Interestingly, Tucker-Drob and Bates did not find this effect in western European countries or in Australia, where socioeconomic status differences tend to be smaller.) The above findings suggest that whenever the heritability of IQ is discussed, it is important to consider the ages of the persons being examined as well as their socioeconomic status and their country.

findings help justify an opinion you may also hold: adolescents have a less rational version of an adult brain, one that takes more risks and has relatively poor decision-making skills.

Irwin Feinberg discovered something fascinating about how this operation of downscaling takes place within the adolescent brain. His findings help justify an opinion you may also hold: adolescents have a less rational version of an adult brain, one that takes more risks and has relatively poor decision-making skills.

At the end of the scene, when Kathy kisses Don, Cosmo objects, thereby provoking Kathy to kiss him as well, to which he responds with girlish abashment (the exchange replays the part of “Good Mornin’” when Kathy sits first on Don’s knee, then on Cosmo’s). 2.5 2.6 2.7 Yet Don and Kathy do not yet engage fully as romantic partners, which becomes clear during the following number, Kelly’s famous solo rendition of the title song, “Singin’ in the Rain,” introduced by his deliberately isolating himself (kissing Kathy good night and then waving off the cab driver). Alone on the rain-drenched sound stage (assuming we have learned to recognize it as such from “You Were Meant for Me”), he clarifies the MERM-related function of such effects, which seem in themselves to demand that he sing. The coordination of MERM and Hollywood-style special effects is particularly close in this number, as he soon leaves the song behind, first to explore the sets and props conveniently at his disposal, and then to match the music’s crescendo with an expansive embrace of the larger space. Here, the camera cranes outward, and Kelly breaks through into a moment of “dancing-sublime,” when his dancing seems either to revert or to come full circle, returning to the primitive urge that gave it birth (thus his stomping and jumping in the puddle like an adolescent boy).34 But the number, through its supreme narcissism, actually does more to inhibit than to advance the plot.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

Le samedi, je retournais chez mes parents. La dissimulation de ma situation ne me coûtait pas, ressortissant à l'état normal de nos relations depuis mon adolescence. Ma mère appartenait à la génération d'avant-guerre, celle du péché et de la honte sexuelle. J'étais sûre que ses croyances étaient intangibles et ma capacité à les endurer n'avait d'égale que la sienne à se persuader que je les partageais.

With enough fat stored away, the fat cells essentially get full; once you are an adolescent, the number of fat cells you have is fixed, so if you put on weight, the individual fat cells are distended. Yet another heavy meal, a burst of insulin trying to promote more fat storage by the fat cells, and the fat cells refuse—“Tough luck, I don’t care if you are insulin; we’re completely full.” No room at the inn.

with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. Over the next few years the social media ecosystem became even more enticing with the introduction of ever more powerful “filters” and editing software within Instagram and via external apps such as Facetune. Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone. While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones. With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. The daily life, consciousness, and social relationships of 13-year-olds with iPhones in 2013 (who were born in 2000) were profoundly different from those of 13-year-olds with flip phones in 2007 (who were born in 1994).

He thought of how often he wished he might line up at the American embassy or the British, and leave. "Listen Momo," he had said to a delighted Sai, "let’s go to Australia." Fly away, bye-bye, ta-ta. Free from history. Free from family demands and the built-up debt of centuries. The patriotism was false, he suddenly felt as he marched; it was surely just frustration—the leaders harnessing the natural irritations and disdain of adolescence for cynical ends; for their own hope in attaining the same power as government officials held now, the same ability to award local businessmen deals in exchange for bribes, for the ability to give jobs to their relatives, places to their children in schools, cooking gas connections. . . .

Even more than legal openness, I’m concerned about emotional openness in the family of adoption. I often see families with adolescents who are acting out in some way and parents who don’t accept that they are all being affected by the issues that inevitably arise in an adoptive family. Although they may talk openly about adoption in general, they are rigid when they talk about it in terms of their own family. There’s a sense of closedness which makes it difficult for the children to feel they can gain information about themselves without hurting their adoptive parents. These families are often committed to appearing as if they are a biologically related one. This is stressful and demeaning for the children, who know that this is not true.

In her book Asperger Syndrome and Adolescence: Practical Solutions for School Success, Brenda Smith Myles identifies six areas of difficulty for adolescents with Asperger’s: • Lack of understanding that nonverbal cues express meaning and attitudes. Teens miss out on many social opportunities because they don’t understand that a smile and glances from another person could mean they like him, or that teachers give a “look” that is a warning and should be interpreted as meaning to calm down and get to work. • Problems with using language to initiate or maintain a conversation. AS teens will often start a conversation with a comment that seems irrelevant, or may walk up to a group of teens and want to join in, but does not because he doesn’t know how or when to join in. • Tendency to interpret words or phrases concretely. AS teens often only understand the literal meanings of words and phrases and not expressions such as “You’re pulling my leg” and “Pull yourself together.” Or, as in the example from Luke Jackson’s book quoted earlier, they will do exactly as told and will not understand the implied statement, which leads teachers to think the teen is a smart aleck. • Difficulty understanding that other people’s perspective in conversation need to be considered. This can lead to one-sided monologues, because the AS student is talking about his area of interest and is not monitoring whether or not the listener is interested. • Failure to understand the unspoken rules of the hidden curriculum or a set of rules everyone knows, but that has not been specifically taught. Things that are important to teens, such as how to dress, what to say to whom, how to act, and how to know the difference between gentle teasing and bullying. • Lack of awareness that what you say to a person in one conversation may influence how that individual relates to you in the future. A teen may make a candid remark to another teen, not realizing it was hurtful, and may be puzzled by the person’s lack of response later that day.

Girls are at particular risk for stress because of the hormone progesterone. Children and postmenopausal women have relatively low levels of progesterone, but with the onset of puberty, progesterone levels increase in girls. Progesterone allows cortisol to run rampant. Once the teenage girl becomes stressed, it takes a long time to de-stress.

Life is . . . a stream flowing from high mountain ranges which wring it from the clouds, coursing down through all the manifold ways in which the water comes down at Lodore to the sea of eternity. Adolescence is the chief rapids in this river of life which may cut a deep canyon and leave its shores a desert.

Each religion has provided a tremendous service in defining elements of conscience. They have made it possible for us to live together in a society, to work toward common goals, and to learn how to accept or tolerate relative opposition to our own opinions. I also think that this has been done much as a parent needs to provide a similar service for an adolescent. Internal and external conflict requires discipline to organize and structure some form of minimizing the chaos imposed on others.

research has shown that older children and adolescents progress more rapidly than younger children particularly in the early stages of learning. The knowledge and skills that older learners are able to acquire in a relatively short period of time will satisfy the needs of many learners whose goal is to use the language for everyday communication, to succeed on foreign language examinations, or to read texts for an academic course rather than to speak with native-like pronunciation.

tolerant of your teens’ misadventures, but make sure you talk to them calmly about their mistakes.         • Don’t be shocked when your teens do something stupid and then say they don’t know why. You now know why, but explain that to them—how their prefrontal lobes haven’t quite come online yet. And remember, even the smartest, most obedient, meekest kids will do something stupid before “graduating” from adolescence.         • Communicate and relate: Emphasize the positive things in your teens’ lives and encourage them to try different activities and new ways of thinking about things. Reinforce that you are there for them when they need advice.         • Social networking tools and websites are an important avenue of communication with your teens. Some parents report that their most successful and meaningful “conversations” with their teens occurred while texting back and forth with them. And if you don’t know how to text yet, ask your teenager.

The relatively new field of “adolescent medicine” focuses not only on the traditional medical model of diagnosis and treatment, but, perhaps more than any other subspecialty of medicine, on education and prevention.

Cheered on by the growing crowd, Gabrielli joined forces with Mario. My teacher said, “In antiquity, pederasty was seen as an educational institution for the inculcation of moral and cultural values by the older man to the younger, as well as a form of sexual expression. It gained representation in history from the Archaic period onwards in Ancient Greece.” Both men had created an imaginary platform, as if speaking in a forum at an ancient amphitheater. “According to Plato, in ancient Greece, pederasty was a relationship and a bond, be it sexual or chaste, between an adult man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family. “Most Greek men engaged in sexual relations with both women and boys, though exceptions to the rule were known; some avoided relations with women and others rejected relations with boys. In Rome relations with boys took a more informal and less civic path, with older men taking advantage of their dominant social status to extract sexual favors from their social inferiors. They carried on illicit relationships with freeborn boys.” My teacher spoke heroically.

June 2012               Dearest Andy, You haven’t changed much over the years. I’m glad we can continue to relate to each other after such a long absence. Times of change had not vanquished my love for you either. You are always in my heart and I’ll continue to cherish your love wherever I am. You haven’t heard the last of Bernard – at one time, he arrived to visit me at Uncle James. I had no idea he was in London when he showed up one afternoon. I had been out running a couple of errands. As I was unlocking the front door, I felt a tap on my shoulder and Bernard was behind me, looking as handsome as when we parted in Belfast. He had grown taller and more mature during our absence. In Ireland he had worked some odd jobs to earn enough money for a one-way plane ticket to London. The only person he knew in London was me. He knew I would not turn him away if he called. Uncle James was in Hong Kong and I was the only one staying in the house; I took the boy in, making him promise that he would have to leave when I moved in 3 weeks to my new lodgings in Ladbroke Grove. He did as promised and was a splendid house guest. When Uncle James returned a week before my move, he was charmed by the adolescent. Bernard made a good impression on Uncle James. The boy had run away from Belfast and planned a fresh start in London. During the course of the 3 weeks, he successfully secured himself as a newspaper delivery boy in the mornings and also worked part-time in a Deli near the house. To top it off, five evenings a week he was a bus boy in an Italian restaurant. Both Uncle James and I were impressed by his industrious tenacity. James decided to help him obtain an apprenticeship with a professional photographer in Edinburgh, Scotland.

My eyes widened and my face turned red as embarrassment gushed through my person. I had never thought of myself in such a manner. But now I knew the reasons I was sought after by dominant, bearded Arab men. I understood why I had the power to make men feeble in the knees and languid at my commands. Victor’s words that morning certainly took on a new meaning in my adolescent life. Before I could continue to bask in this glorious revelation, my teacher suggested, “Use your temporal assets wisely, or you may end up like many before you, in self destructive jeopardy.” I stared at him, speechless. “Pay attention, young man…” he proceeded slowly. “There are four basic homoerotic notions in Arab societies: * First, the acknowledgment of male beauty, even in other males’ eyes, and its capability of inducing ‘fitna’ (disorder). * Second, the recognition of the natural vulnerability of a grown man to be charmed by a handsome adolescent, to the point that mainstream scholars and theologians urged readers to resist the related temptation that follows this natural appreciation. * Third, the affirmation that love and passion exist hand in hand with related dangers - and not just sexual desires - that might be the driving force in a man-to-man attraction. * Fourth, and certainly not the least, the focus in classical literature and poetry on man-boy love, whereas grown male attraction is marginalized and regarded as mujun (ribaldry) or sukhf (obscenity).”               Señor Victor Angel Triqueros added, “No social definition of homosexuality existed in the Arab world during the reign of the Ottoman Empire. There was no native concept applicable to all and only those men who were sexually attracted to members of their own sex rather than to women. Therefore, no single word exists in Arabic to describe men engaging in same-sex relationships. But there is a categorization of sexual acts: language that uses such specific terms as liwat (anal sex), luti (active sodomite who prefers boys over women, ma’bun (passive sodomite), mukhannath (effeminate passive sodomite), mu’ajir (passive male prostitute), dabb (active sodomite who likes raping his victims in their sleep regardless of their age), musahiqa (lesbian), along with a string of others.

These brain regions are used every day for basic cognitive tasks, whether it’s abstract thinking, the ability to change one’s behavior in relation to changing demands in the environment, or the inhibition of inappropriate responses.

After Rahul graduated from high school their parents celebrated, having in their opinion now successfully raised two children in America. Rahul was going to Cornell, and Sudha was still in Philadephia, getting a master's in international relations. Their parents threw a party, inviting nearly two hundred people, and bought Rahul a car, justifying it as a necessity for his life in Ithaca. They bragged about the school, more impressed by it than they'd been with Penn. "Our job is done," her father declared at the end of the party, posing for pictures with Rahul and Sudha on either side. For years they had been compared to other Bengali children, told about gold medals brought back from science fairs, colleges that offered full scholarships. Sometimes Sudha's father would clip newspaper articles about unusually gifted adolescents - the boy who finished his PhD at twenty, the girl who went to Stanford at twelve - and tape them on the refrigerator. When Sudha was fourteen, her father had written to Harvard Medical School, requested an application, and placed it on her desk.

Should a child be allowed to “decide for himself” on matters related to God? Aren’t we forcing our religion down children’s throats when we tell them what to believe? Let me answer with an illustration from nature. A little gosling (baby goose) has a peculiar characteristic that is relevant at this point. Shortly after it hatches from its shell it becomes attached, or “imprinted,” to the first thing seen moving nearby. From that time forward, the gosling follows that particular object when it moves in the vicinity. Ordinarily, it becomes imprinted to the mother goose which hatched the new generation. If she is removed, however, the gosling settles for any mobile substitute, whether alive or not. In fact, a gosling becomes imprinted most easily to a blue football bladder, dragged by on a string. A week later, the baby falls in line behind the bladder as it scoots by. Time is the critical factor in this process. The gosling is vulnerable to imprinting for only a few seconds after hatching from the shell. If that opportunity is lost, it cannot be regained. In other words, there is a critical, brief period in the gosling’s life when this instinctual learning is possible. There is also a critical period when certain kinds of instruction are easier in the life of children. Although humans have no instincts (only drives, reflexes, urges, etc.), there is a brief period during childhood when youngsters are vulnerable to religious training. Their concepts of right and wrong are formulated during this time, and their view of God begins to solidify. As in the case of the gosling, the opportunity of that period must be seized when it is available. Leaders of the Catholic Church have been widely quoted as saying, “Give us the child until he is seven years old and we’ll have him for life.” They are usually correct, because permanent attitudes can be instilled during these seven vulnerable years. Unfortunately, however, the opposite is also true. The absence or misapplication of instruction through that prime-time period may place a severe limitation on the depth of a child’s later devotion to God. When parents withhold indoctrination from their small children, allowing them to “decide for themselves,” the adults are almost guaranteeing that their youngsters will “decide” in the negative. If parents want their children to have a meaningful faith, they must give up any misguided attempts at objectivity. Children listen closely to discover just how much their parents believe what they preach. Any indecision or ethical confusion from the parent is likely to be magnified in the child. After the middle adolescent age (ending at about fifteen years), children resent being told exactly what to believe. They don’t want religion “forced down their throats,” and should be given more autonomy in what they believe. If the early exposure has been properly conducted, children will have an inner mainstay to steady them. Their early indoctrination, then, is the key to the spiritual attitudes they carry into adulthood.

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and- as I will show-unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness-perpetually-to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers.

But I felt constrained using the voice of an adolescent girl who didn’t know enough because I didn’t know enough. I was too young then. It was a crisis that swirled around me, rather than cut through me, and yet the riots have weighed on my conscience as a crucible of race relations that this nation failed.

The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.

No. You must stop wanting anything. You must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is. Because, you see, she isn’t. Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you’ve found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It’s just growing pains. One can’t jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean—anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul—only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.

When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, there was very little in the way of literate adventure writing. Periodicals that catered to our adolescent dreams of travel and adventure clearly held us in contempt. Feature articles in magazines that might be called Man’s Testicle carried illustrations of tough, unshaven guys dragging terrified women in artfully torn blouses through jungles, caves, or submarine corridors; through hordes of menacing bikers, lions, and hippopotami. The stories bore the same relation to the truth that professional wrestling bears to sport, which is to say, they were larger-than-life contrivances of an artfully absurd nature aimed, it seemed, at lonely bachelor lip-readers, drinkers of cheap beer, violence-prone psychotics, and semiliterate Walter Mitty types whose vision of true love involved the rescue of some distressed damsel about to be ravaged by bikers, lions, or hippopotami.

I hold a Master's degree in Counseling and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Counselor Education and Supervision from the University of Texas at San Antonio.I have provided consultation and training to a variety of graduate students enrolled in the clinical and mental health program as a professor in the Graduate Counseling Program at The University of Texas at San Antonio.I have over 9 years of experience providing mental health and addictions-related counseling services to adolescents, adults, and elders in a variety of different settings.

There is, as a legion of morose poets well know, nothing inconsequential about love. Nor all those peculiarities of related appetites often confused for love, for example lust, possession, amorous worship, appalling notions of abject surrender where one’s own will is bled out in sacrifice, obsessions of the fetishistic sort that might include earlobes or toenails or regurgitated foodstuffs, and indeed that adolescent competitiveness which in adults – adults who should of course know better but don’t – is manifested as insane jealousy.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

I was intrigued. Young people like Amanda are not often best friends with their mothers. And yet the affection between them was clear. Sensing also, however, her mother’s disapproval of Amanda’s lifestyle, I asked what was the bond that had allowed her to remain close to her mother. Amanda replied, “For as long as I can remember, every night of my life I end the day by getting in bed with my mother and snuggling.” Amanda’s relationship with her mother is quite remarkable, and is in large part responsible for the fact that she has now left behind what she describes as her “black period” and is finding her way through adolescence in a relatively healthy manner. Amanda knew that she was deeply loved just exactly as she was. Her mother disapproved of her use of drugs, her promiscuous sex, her astoundingly profane language, her Satanic practices and most other aspects of her lifestyle. But with a wisdom that I have rarely seen in parents, she recognized that what her daughter needed was not lectures but love. Fortunately, she had been giving this in large doses for all of Amanda’s life. Equally fortunately, she did not now allow her disapproval of her daughter’s behavior to interrupt this pattern in the slightest. Amanda’s mother offered a truly transforming love—transforming because while it could be resisted, it could not be received without profound psychospiritual impact.

Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse…[citing two related studies in 1996 and 2003 led by Karlen Lyons-Ruth] Emotional withdrawal had the most profound and lasting impact. Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults…Lyons-Ruth concludes that infants who are not truly seen and known by their mothers are at high risk to grow into adolescents who are unable to known and to see.

he was an unusually sober and purposeful young man. In countless letters in later years, he advised young relatives that adolescence was a risky time when evil influences lurked nearby, ready to pounce: “You are now extending into that stage of life when good or bad habits are formed. When the mind will be turned to things useful and praiseworthy or to dissipation and vice.

Growing up doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting the religion of our ancestors, but it does entail sorting out the good from the bad in order to reclaim what has remained viable. It’s a balancing act: to recognize the blessings, even the ones that come well disguised, in the form of difficult relatives who have given you false images of Jesus with which you must contend. And it means naming and exorcising the curses—not cursing the people themselves, who may have left you stranded with a boogeyman God, but cleansing oneself of the damage that was done. The temptation to simply reject what we can’t handle is always there; but it means becoming stuck in a perpetual adolescence, a perpetual seeking for something, anything, that doesn’t lead us back to where we came from.

When we discovered that a low sense of control is enormously stressful and that autonomy is key to developing motivation,1 we thought we were onto something important. This impression was confirmed when we started to probe deeper and found that a healthy sense of control is related to virtually everything we want for our children, including physical and mental health, academic success, and happiness. From 1960 until 2002, high school and college students have steadily reported lower and lower levels of internal locus of control (the belief that they can control their own destiny) and higher levels of external locus of control (the belief that their destiny is determined by external forces). This change has been associated with an increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression. In fact, adolescents and young adults today are five to eight times more likely to experience the symptoms of an anxiety disorder than young people were at earlier times, including during the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war.