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http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20050119-000004.html

Adolescent Angst

With so many bad ideas around, it's certain that some of psychology's worst have yet to be exposed. Adolescent angst is a good example. The idea that adolescence is necessarily a time of emotional turmoil was introduced by pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1904 and has been widely accepted ever since. It still provides a rationale for America's massive and deeply troubled juvenile justice system, which handles more than 1.5 million teens a year, and it is also at the heart of a wide range of therapeutic treatments for teens.

But Hall based his concept of adolescence on a faulty theory from biology -- "recapitulation theory," according to which each individual creature, as it develops, relives the evolutionary stages of its species. Hall conjectured that teens were reliving a time of "savagery" in our distant past -- "an ancient period of storm and stress." By the 1930s, recapitulation theory had been completely discredited, but this had no effect on Hall's theory, which had by this time taken on its own life.

Teen turmoil, it turns out, is far from inevitable. In a recent review of 186 contemporary preindustrial societies, researchers found that more than half had no sign of it. Yet the idea that teen angst is unavoidable is pervasive in our culture.

Hall's theory has probably set a vicious cycle in motion: Society responds to teen problems (drinking, drug use, pregnancy and so on) with restrictive laws and treatments, which in turn cause more teens to act out and rebel. The tumultuous stage of life we call "adolescence" is, without doubt, a creation of modern culture, not an inevitable stage of human development, and our own culture has produced far more of it than has any other culture in the world -- in part, perhaps, because of a faulty idea from psychology.