This paper describes a reconceptualization of adolescent experience and sets forth major features of a concatenation theory (1)(Kaplan, 1964) of adolescent psychology.

Adolescent experience is regarded as indistinguishable in some respects from the experience of other humans, since for all of us, psychological life is a polyphony of affection, cognition and conation that has both an internal, phenomenological or subjective aspect, and an objective, public, or material aspect.

Adolescents, no less and no more than other humans, think, feel and strive within a situation that they recurrently appraise and transform with imagination. Situations consist of both objective, externally-given particulars; and subjective, internally-given particulars, that inform the imagination as it does its work of reconciling the individual's life with his situation. Since imagination is informed by acquired ideals, standards, aspirations and wishes; and since it is also informed by appetite, sensations, aesthetic sensibilities, and comparisons of what seems to be the case as opposed to what is most desired, it is, in its everyday work, given to noticing lacunae in the situation as it is experienced.

However, since adolescents share some distinctive subjective and objective characteristics, they are deemed to have experience that is distinguishable from that of children and adults.

The shared features of the adolescent situation, are directly linked to the degree of adolescents' inexperience and immaturity; their marginal status (between childhood and adulthood); their experience of socio-cultural demands that they make choices, decisions and commitments that have long- term implications; their new reproductive readiness and the task of coping with what the mature body suggests to oneself and to others; their experience of the cultural confusions that attend their situation, and so on.

The concatenated features of the adolescent situation are regarded as conditions that maximize the normal human tendency to search for, be sensitive to, and be animated by the presence of lacunae in experience.

While lacunae can vary in every way humans can imagine, lacunae of beauty, truth and goodness are regarded as unusually important to adolescents because of the nature of their situation.

In this paper such lacunae are linked to the mental provinces of striving, thought and feeling as they, in imagination, compose the polyphony of experience afforded by the adolescent situation.

The theory is contrasted with other theories that fall short in understanding adolescent experience, because of their monophonous emphasis. The cultural and educational significance of this perspective is discussed.

LeRoy D. Travis: "Adolescent experience reconceptualized: lacunae, imagination and the mental provinces in adolescence". Paper presented at the First International Congress of Adolescentology, Assisi, Italy, October 22-24, 1993.

Key Words: Concatenation theory, Imagination, Lacunae, Mental provinces

LeRoy D. Travis, Ph.D., The University of British Columbia, EPSE Canada