‘Adolescents are excessively egoistic… .’ This statement is true. Youths can sometimes think they are or better than anyone else. For instance, one of my co-workers tries to boss me around.
She thinks that she has power over me because she has worked at the restaurant longer than I have. She is in no place of authority, yet she seems to think she is. Regardless of how many times she has been spoken to by a supervisor she continue to pick on me. This sentence struck me as being correct. ‘[Youths] form the most passionate love-relations, only to break them off as abruptly as they began them.’ My friend had a boyfriend last year, and she was totally in love with him. They seemed so close, so it didn’t seem weird when they announced they were going to move in with one another.
Several months later they had a huge fight over something trivial and ended up leaving each other. ‘Their moods veer between light-hearted optimism and blackest pessimism’ is true of most teenagers. When I started high school I was so excited. I had been looking forward to it all summer, yet after the first week I despised the school. In fact, I still hate Runnymede to this day. Another part of the excerpt says that adolescents ‘…
oscillate between blind submission to some self-chosen leader and defiant rebellion against some authority.’ Youths are beginning to assert their independence, so it is normal for them to sway from authority. They may find themselves at war with their parents, whom they see as a dominant power. A friend of mine sees her parents as exactly that. She fights with them every chance she gets. For the most part, the arguments are about insignificant things such as where to order take-out, or what radio station to play in the car.
The Essay on Obedience to Authority
The article is focused on how people think about and react to authorities. The author in particular chronicles his own experiences and a stranger’s experiences in terms of defying authorities and obeying authorities. But at the end of the day, the author admitted that even when defiance to the authorities can be a principled move, it is likewise as dangerous as obeying the authorities. He is ...
I believe that Anna Freud depicts adolescents well. She raised many good points about adolescents. What strikes me is that even though she wrote the book many years ago, her facts still hold true of youths today.
