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Puberty was originally defined anatomically and physiologically as the appearance of secondary signs of sexual maturation that mark the beginning of the adolescent process which will put an end to the period of childhood that had been prolonged by the period of latency. The concepts of puberty and adolescence have been increasingly considered as belonging to the field of psychoanalysis only progressively.

Of course the chapter on the "Transformations of Puberty" in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d) is the essential text by Freud on this subject, but to ascertain the reason for the key place this stage assumes in metapsychological development, it is necessary to go back to the early hypotheses on trauma. The seduction theory formulated in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d) assumed in effect two distinct scenes separated by puberty. It is this breakthrough from the presexual (albeit already oriented by the phallus to the genital) which gives both chronological and logical meaning to the twin ideas of latency and deferred action.

For Freud therefore, above and beyond the impact it has on the body and the psychological implications of this, puberty is something that operates: initially as a real trauma, then later as a logical operand in the seduction-fantasy, where it served to delineate boundaries. That being said, the 1905 essay on puberty and all the preceding work was to be enriched by later discoveries, such as the 1914 theory of narcissism and, in 1924, the second topology and the death drive hypothesis.

What is at stake in puberty is clear from the outset: "With the arrival of puberty, changes set in which are destined to give infantile sexual life its final, normal shape. The sexual instinct has hitherto been predominantly auto-erotic; it now finds a sexual object" (1905d, p. 206). Freud then raises five questions, all of which are still being asked, on the nature of puberty: First of all, how is the erotic destiny of each person, perversion aside, determined by the way in which the pregential drives are simultaneously placed in submission to and in the service of genitality, which is the sign of normality? Secondly, what is the role, necessary but not sufficient, of the "chemical" factor in causing sexual tension and pleasure, given that even neurosis "greatly resembles" a state of intoxication and want? Thirdly, according to the theory of narcissism how will ego libido and object libido be fused in this moment of anticipated tension and complementarity between the currents of love and sex? Fourthly, how is, in a final renunciation of bisexuality, the man's "more logical" development going to then be differentiated from the "involution" of the young woman who willingly rejoins her initial, oral sexual orientations at the same time as she accedes to genitality? Fifth and finally, in what way is the new sexual object, a semblance of the Other sex, at once both new and rediscovered on the basis of the primal objects, the ancestors of the Other sex? In his conclusion devoted to the risks associated with homosexual inversion occasioned by both familial and social milieus, Freud alerts us to the fact that this accession to a sexual relationship which assumes responsibility for the difference between the sexes, does not occur automatically.

For a long time after Freud puberty remained a secondary preoccupation for psychoanalysts. Instead, under the influence of child analysts and fueled in particular by the debates between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, interest tended to focus on the relationship between earliest infancy and the oedipal period, with adolescence being considered as little more than the outcome of precocious determinants. On the other hand in the field of psychopathology, the side of adolescence, dissociated from puberty, concerned with the trials of socialization and its psycho-pathological failures, became the privileged focus of study in the texts on this period (Siegfried Bernfeld, August Aichhorn).

Only recently, and especially in Great Britain and France, has interest been renewed in puberty as distinct from the ensemble of adolescent processes, and designated as such as being their origin. Donald Winnicott was the first to recall that it is sexual maturation, not only social exigencies, which reactivate oedipal difficulties, giving rise to murderous and incestuous feelings which were all too easily repressed in childhood when they were unrealizable, and calling for a second oedipal working-through, subject to new ups and downs. Moses Laufer has elaborated on this approach by explicating the more-or-less pathological crises of adolescence using the concept of breakdown, reworked from Winnicott, but which is for Laufer a developmental fracture in the integration of the body image which, following puberty, needs to then incorporate the genital organs and allow for a new compromise between masturbatory fantasy and the demands of the superego. With this Philippe Gutton was able to produce the concept of the "pubertal, which is to the psyche what puberty is to the body." Although he left room for debate, Gutton distinguished distinctly and chronologically between the category of feelings that refashion the aim of the drive from the phallic to the genital and are oriented towards a new, complementary, part object—and the adolescens process, which is a reconstruction of referents and ideals that this genital identity imposes.

On the Lacanian side, which has proved more reticent with respect to the psychogenetic approach, the texts are few and far between: For Françoise Dolto, puberty is a third "moment of synthesis" (after the mirror stage and the Oedipus complex), in the construction of an unconscious body image. Jean-Jacques Rassial views puberty in its somatic, but also psychic aspects, as the Real blow that necessitates an Imaginary reconstruction and a new Symbolic foundation, insofar as this is an adolescent function.

The production of the concept of puberty points toward a certain number of theoretical modifications: First off (and this is borne out by clinical experience), the topological status of puberty, be it individual or social, and which affects not only the ego but also the id and the superego, affirms the autonomy of the psychical from the somatic and the social, because psychic puberty does not always occur at the same time as these two other puberties. Secondly, from a dynamic point of view, Freudian precepts hold that the conflicts taking place during this time are not only the repetition of earlier conflicts, and therefore all psychogenesis, and particularly the pre-pubertal function of the latency period, needs to be rethought. Thirdly, the economic function of the phallus, between drive and representation, is put into question by its separation during this period from the genital that cannot, after all, be reduced to just its imaginary employment.

As is already apparent in Freud's texts, the transformations of puberty are not a simple issue of psychogenetics, but raise the question of the function of sexuality as a whole. In other words, behind the story that goes from infantile sexuality to so-called adult normality there lies another, about the infantilism of a sexuality that destines the sexual relationship to its failures, which diverge according to the sexual genital in question.

JEAN-JACQUES RASSIAL

See also: Adolescence; Genital stage; Psychosexual development; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.