Puberty

Puberty occupies a structurally decisive position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a biological threshold, a psychodynamic turning point, and a symbolic rite of passage. Freud’s treatment in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality establishes the foundational formulation: puberty constitutes the second wave of diphasic object-choice, reactivating the repressed residues of infantile sexuality and pressing them toward a new, genitally organized outcome. The pubertal moment is thus not a beginning but a resumption, charged with the unresolved energies of the latency period. Jung and his successors extend this frame into the symbolic register—Jung’s index in The Practice of Psychotherapy explicitly equates puberty with initiation, while his remarks on student marriage identify a prolonged ‘psychological puberty’ as a culturally normative condition of masculine development. Panksepp grounds the transition in affective neuroscience, describing puberty as the activational phase that brings to life the organizational imprints laid down by prenatal hormones. Contemporary clinical research—particularly the systematic reviews on ADHD and sex hormones—foregrounds puberty as a period of neurobiological vulnerability, especially for females, in whom dopaminergic reorganization may exacerbate attentional and impulsive symptoms. Across these traditions, puberty appears as the moment when phylogenetic inheritance and individual biography collide, making it indispensable to any depth-psychological account of development, symptom formation, and the architecture of the self.

In the library 18 passages

The second wave sets in with puberty and determines the final outcome of sexual life. Although the diphasic nature of object-choice comes down in essentials to no more than the operation of the latency period, it is of the highest importance in regard to disturbances of that final outcome.

Freud establishes puberty as the second, determining wave of diphasic object-choice, whose pathological significance lies in how it revives and transforms the repressed residues of infantile sexuality.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis

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Puberty is a key period of neurodevelopment, coinciding with widespread neuronal proliferation, synapse formation, and elimination. Preclinical rat studies have shown in males, dopamine receptors are overproduced preceding and during puberty, with density reducing into adulthood.

Puberty is identified as a critical neurodevelopmental window in which dopaminergic reorganization diverges by sex, helping explain why ADHD symptom trajectories differ between males and females across this transition.

al., Osianlis et, ADHD and sex hormones in females: A systematic review, 2025thesis

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The imprint that is made on male and female fetal brains by early hormonal tides is finally developed at puberty. The passionate potentials of the nervous system are brought to life by renewed tides of hormone secretion.

Panksepp argues that puberty constitutes the activational phase in which prenatally organized neural sex differences are brought into full functional expression through renewed hormonal secretion.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis

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With many men of twenty-five the period of psychological puberty is not yet over. Puberty is a period of illusion and only partial responsibility.

Jung extends puberty beyond its biological boundary into a prolonged psychological state characterized by incomplete reality-testing and diminished personal accountability, particularly in men.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis

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The intensification of the brake upon sexuality brought about by pubertal repression in women serves as a stimulus to the libido in men and causes an increase of its activity.

Freud argues that pubertal repression in women, far from being merely inhibitory, functions as an excitatory stimulus for male libido, establishing a gendered asymmetry at the heart of the pubertal transformation.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis

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Often enough the first impulses after puberty go astray, though without any permanent harm resulting. Dessoir has justly remarked upon the regularity with which adolescent boys and girls form sentimental friendships with others of their own sex.

Freud treats post-pubertal fumbling in object-choice, including homoerotic attachment, as a statistically normal phase rather than a permanent inversion, contextualizing it within the social prohibition of inversion.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis

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It is generally assumed that libido in this sense comes into existence only at puberty. How, then, are we to explain the fact that children have a polymorphous-perverse sexuality, and that the libido activates not merely one perversion but several?

Jung, engaging critically with Freud’s libido concept, exposes the theoretical contradiction of locating the emergence of libido at puberty while simultaneously acknowledging pre-pubertal polymorphous sexuality in children.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902thesis

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Some among the sexual phantasies of the pubertal period are especially prominent, and are distinguished by their very general occurrence and by being to a great extent independent of individual experience.

Freud identifies a class of universally recurring pubertal fantasies—concerning primal scenes, seduction, castration, and the family romance—that link puberty to the activation of phylogenetically transmitted unconscious material.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting

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Studies were grouped by the hormonal phase within which ADHD symptoms were being measured, including menstrual cycle, puberty, and pregnancy.

This systematic review explicitly treats puberty as one of several discrete hormonal phases within which ADHD symptom expression in females must be evaluated, situating it within a lifespan hormonal framework.

al., Osianlis et, ADHD and sex hormones in females: A systematic review, 2025supporting

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Future studies should examine hormonal effects on ADHD both across reproductive life stages (e.g., over years and decades) and within different reproductive events (i.e., daily or monthly across puberty, pregnancy, menopause).

Eng calls for research designs that treat puberty not as a discrete event but as an extended hormonal process whose interaction with ADHD symptoms requires longitudinal, within-person analysis.

Eng, Ashley G., Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and the menstrual cycle: Theory and evidence, 2024supporting

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Schizophrenia is not a puberty psychosis in the strict sense of the word, although in the majority of patients the sickness becomes manifest soon after puberty.

Bleuler differentiates schizophrenia from a true puberty psychosis while acknowledging the statistical clustering of its clinical onset in the post-pubertal period, implying a developmental vulnerability without aetiological determinism.

Bleuler, Eugen, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911supporting

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The maturation of the sexual characters which is accomplished at puberty… is not a product of education, and no doubt education has much to do with it. But in reality this development is organically determined and fixed by heredity.

Freud asserts the organic and hereditary determination of pubertal sexual maturation, resisting purely environmental or educational explanations while conceding a subsidiary role to cultural formation.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting

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The same symbol appears in the girls’ puberty ritual, where a tiny bow of mudyi wood is placed at the apex of the girl novice’s seclusion hut… The bow, draped with white beads representing children, stands for the novice’s desired fertility.

Turner documents how girls’ puberty rituals among the Ndembu encode the transition to reproductive maturity through elaborately layered symbolic objects, situating puberty within the anthropology of liminality and rite of passage.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting

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pubertal, 63, 65-6, 87, 91-4, 100-1

The index of the Three Essays clusters pubertal object-choice with incestuous and narcissistic modes of object selection, indicating the structural centrality of puberty to Freud’s entire developmental schema.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting

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The forces destined to retain the sexual instinct upon certain lines are built up in childhood chiefly at the cost of perverse sexual impulses and with the assistance of education.

Freud situates the pre-pubertal construction of anti-sexual barriers as the precondition for the reorganization of libido that puberty subsequently demands, linking childhood repression to pubertal transformation.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905aside

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ADHD has historically been considered a male condition due to the higher diagnostic rates in boys, with current prevalence estimates in childhood of a 2.4:1 ratio of boys to girls.

The systematic review’s framing of sex-biased ADHD diagnosis in childhood provides the epidemiological context within which puberty’s differential effects on female symptom expression become clinically significant.

al., Osianlis et, ADHD and sex hormones in females: A systematic review, 2025aside

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