“The young are prone to desire and inclined to do whatever they desire”

(Aristotle)

Over the last thirty years, in Western societies, with the advent of globalization adolescence has been the object of study, reflection and research in a variety of fields, ranging from life-cycle psychology to developmental psychopathology, from psychoanalysis to neuroscience, from sociology to anthropological studies.
Never as in this historical period has adolescence been studied and analyzed, not only in the fields mentioned above, but also, massively and incisively, by the consumer market and the mass media, seeking to identify and often to manipulate its needs.
Retracing historical analyses of adolescence, from the Middle Ages and, earlier still, from the Greek and Roman civilizations, one realizes that what has changed over time is not so much its duration (in Rome, for example, one was a puer until the age of 15 and adulescentia ran from 15 to 30), but the way one becomes an adult and the contents of formation.
In Greek society, at the center of the male adolescent’s path of growth was learning to fight (the Homeric kouros was an adolescent warrior), to hunt, to ride, developing the skills to defend oneself, to attack, to secure a living.
Military education (which carried a very different meaning then from what emerges today in the chilling images of child soldiers trained to kill in the name of fanaticisms of destruction and death) was flanked, in Athenian society, by a cultural formation entrusted to a tutor; the education of the body was joined by that of the spirit, with writing, philosophy, music and games.
In the Middle Ages this educational aim persists: to become knights, with the additional mandate, compared with the past, of protecting the Church and defending the faith, a sort of mission of loyalty, courage and contempt for danger, meant to ensure the defense of society and of the Church, and also a sort of ascent toward the male sexual role, in the conquest not only of territories and power but also of women, for the affirmation of sexual supremacy.
From the Renaissance onward, the conflict between religious education and sexual impulsiveness and dissoluteness becomes more evident. Shakespeare indeed wrote in The Winter’s Tale: «I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting».
In the nineteenth century the modern adolescent is born: above all a student, whose fundamental task is learning and schooling, or an apprentice starting to work in factories or small workshops, a rebellious adolescent who drinks, swears, smokes, anticipating those transgressive behaviors we will find again in the street kids of later eras. Lampwick in Pinocchio still remains the emblematic portrait of the restless adolescent without bearings, in perpetual flight from every bond and institution.
What traces remain today of this adolescent history so briefly retraced? What ties does the adolescent of the 2000s retain with his ancestors? That «ambiguous mixture of fragility and bravado», as Gustavo Pietropolli Charmet writes, which characterizes many adolescents today, what kinship or distance does it bear to «the young heated by Nature», as Aristotle defined them? As already noted, the psychoanalysis of adolescence and developmental neuropsychology have in recent years contributed greatly to our knowledge of the environmental and socio-familial factors and the life contexts in which the adolescent breathes, thinks and feels.
To these sciences, in particular, goes the merit of having studied and carried out research on adolescent girls, so forgotten or barely glimpsed in earlier eras; their portraits of restlessness, bewilderment, vital impulses and self-destruction strike us today and draw the attention of the adult world in various ways: from young anorexics grappling with the anxiety-laden advance of puberty, to depressed sixteen-year-olds shut away at home, to those who mark their bodies with cuts and piercings to highlight, provocatively, its role as a battlefield in the process of growing up, to the Lolitas willing to sell that very body, commodified and as such annulled and trampled in its symbolic meaning.

Today much more is known about the so-called “developmental tasks” of adolescence; they have been identified, listed and studied in their complexity and importance, and we list the main ones because they reflect in part the fact of being biologically determined, in part of being dictated by the culture of the human group one belongs to.
The adolescent, then, must mentalize the changing body, accepting its sexual maturation; must develop a capacity for self-reflection and a critical conscience; must acquire a certain degree of individual and social autonomy; must master hypothetical thinking, internalize a system of values and an ethical conscience…and so on.
Despite this detailed mapping, today’s adolescents often seem to neglect their “developmental tasks”, for multiple and complex reasons.
In the “age of sad passions”, with adults ever more worried about the future, ever more unstable and precarious from various points of view, with a school system faltering in its educational function and in its ethical and symbolic meaning, with disquieting scenarios concerning individual and collective identities, today’s adolescent has grown ever more convinced that «the self is more important than the cult of and devotion to what is other than the self» (Pietropolli Charmet).
The new Narcissus, intent on the cult of himself, without rigid and precise institutional reference points, with few rules to respect, with little motivation to contest the laws of adults, runs serious risks of losing himself along his path of growth, of identifying in his personal needs the only or the principal reason for living. So self-centered, he tolerates frustration poorly, and feelings of rage and shame invade him, at times with serious consequences for himself and for others. Boredom too often surfaces in his life, owing to that too-soon and right-away which has characterized, and still characterizes, the satisfaction of his needs, often met without struggle, without effort, without desire.
Alongside the myth of Narcissus, evoked to represent metaphorically the adolescent of today, another key figure is summoned to indicate the psychic, social and cultural state of today’s adolescents: the figure of Telemachus, the son awaiting the return of his father Ulysses from the long war to conquer Troy. Telemachus symbolizes the absence of the father, the need for the father to be restored not as a father-master, Massimo Recalcati tells us, but as a father who is a “witness” to the passage into adulthood, to the possibility of living, while young, with desires, responsibilities, plans for the future. And this in a reality where the young are destined to inherit precious little that is good (environmental disasters, a climate gone mad, economic collapse, pathological addictions, abuses of power, corruption and so on).
On this waiting we pause: on Telemachus scanning the sea, a sea from which today we see the shipwrecked arrive, alive and dead, from countries we once thought so distant. On this waiting the destiny of future generations is played out today, in the hope of recovering father-witnesses, capable of giving desire and its Law once again because, to quote Massimo Recalcati once more, «this is the true and only kingdom that can be handed down from one generation to the next.»

Maria Celeste Pierantoni. Child and adolescent neuropsychiatrist. She headed a public service in her field of specialization, with specific training in adolescence. She provides training and counseling for teachers and parents on the problems of adolescent distress. She lives and works between Orvieto and Viterbo.