The Adolescent Girl - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1920. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTERin THE ADOLESCENT CONFLICT Origin of individualistic impulses; Will to power; Factors which reinforce will to power in adolescent girls; Illustrative cases; Freudian interpretation of the conflict; Cases which illustrate the conflict between the will to power and the racial impulses; Feminism and the masculine protest; The real adolescent conflict. With the influx of sexual impulses into her soul, the adolescent girl enters upon a period of intense mental conflict, for these new motives have been utterly foreign to all her previous experience, and not without a struggle to retain their old supremacy do the egocentric tendencies give way to the altruistic feelings and emotions. The self-regarding instincts have their genetic origin in the self-preservative activities of the lower organisms, the primordial expression being the absorption and assimilation of nutritive material. The whole complex struggle for existence, both passive and active, is rooted in this same desire to prolong individual existence, a desire which is as truly a form of the whole libido, or elan vital, as is the less selfish racial energy, which strives for the preservation of the species. In the human species, the egocentric motives have also a broad psychic irradiation which has been aptly named by Adler, perhaps through the influence of the Nietzschean doctrines, the will to power. There are several factors which unite to reinforce this Wille zur Macht at adolescence, so that it becomes no mean competitor with the racial impulses in the struggle for dominance over the psychic life. Adler, himself, developed the theory of the power motif as an explanation of the neurotic constitution, in which he considers it the guiding principle (1). It exists just as truly in the normal in...