Youth

Abstract

In youth from the ages of twenty to twenty-five the public retention schema as well as the private schema grows in terms of greater formalization. Youth knows of a world that exists independently of his own sensibilities and rationality, but organizes everything around himself, in terms of what he feels, does and knows. He has his own set of categories, a more limited one that he has any grounds for suspecting, and he is still heedless of the equipment of others. He selects in terms of his own advantage, by means of his own opportunities, and from his own perspective. This is the last vestige of infantile solipsism, but it is still formidable because so highly organized, and even more perhaps because thanks to his strength it is used so dynamically. Youth has the maximum of primary energy to devote to the defense and justification of secondary drives. He does not yet have the reserves of secondary energy nor the secondary goals. And before he can have them he must somehow allow the egocentrism to run its course and purge him of that residue of it which is still part of his nature.