Medicine, Mind and Adolescence 2001, XVI, 1-2
THE
ADOLESCENT AS PERSON - PERSON CENTERED ADOLESCENCE
THEORY
Giuseppe R. Brera1
THEORY
Giuseppe R. Brera1
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Abstract
The core of adolescence is the appearance of new possibilities in perceiving and constructing reality in personal and interpersonal relationships. The whole person, body, mind, and spirit is involved in what could be defined as a new subjective hermeneutics. Possibilities originate from new logical, noethical, biological, affective, and social components that characterize the adolescent as a new self.
Hypothetico-deductive structures provide a time for a possible objective truth, noethical structures a time for a unitary objective meaning in symbolic cognitive, affective and behavioral experience, and biological structures underlie the existence of an objective teleonomy in endocrinological, neuro-biological, and immunitary variables. Affective structures reveal the tendency toward genital personality and toward interpersonal reciprocal and creative relationships; social structures reveal the tendency to autonomous opinions, feelings, choices, and behaviors in social relations. Adolescence appears as an interaction among these factors and subjectively, through possibilities and the quality of coping toward an objective expression of a gender phenotype.These new possibilities have the same denominator: the call for realizing an objective reality within one’s subjectivity. This theory represents the core of the kairological hermeneutics of human nature that is represented by the enunciation: “ Is it true that this experience has been good for me?”; and by connotation “ It is true that this experience is good for me”. The study of possibilities for answering such questions is the field of kairological research and clinical practice whose important results are already evident in medical applications. This has given birth to the “person-centred medicine“ and to “person- centred counselling”.
Identity, more than a psychological construct, appears as the person’s work for answering this with new possibilities, building a new objective reality that in philosophical terms, thanks to Saint Thomas’ philosophy, we may call “an actualization of “being” in existence”. Adolescence represents the person’s entry into the kingdom of mystery. Mystery is the existence of pre-determined structures which call for the construction of an objective reality, these permitting the revelation of a world of possibilities. This mystery is that of the existence of an unpredictable one necessary possibility of objective reality.
The other discovery in adolescence is the necessity of individual responsibility for realizing a personal reality through a necessary choice among possibilities, and the experience of unpredictable possibilities, and limits in finding and perceiving that necessary one. This experience corresponds to a non determined creation of an opportune time-space for the personal realizing of the objective meaning of life: the “kairos” of existence. This process forms the logical connection “if and only if”. The research of “kairos” could be named “ Pathos of existence”.
During the last century many psychological theories as: Freudian psychoanalisis, behaviorism, cognitivistism, reductionist human psychology alienated the person far from his own quest of an objective meaning which is the higher revelation of the spiritual dimension of existence, with a reductionism to the sphere of a mere subjectivity. This could be expressed by the enunciation: “what is emotion is truth.” The spread of self-destructive behaviors may appear as the consequence of a reductionist hermeneutics which has determined superficial pragmatic approaches to adolescents who run the risk of enclosure within adaptive theories that do no elicit possibilities, resources and responsibilities.
There is a general and dangerous destruction in clinical approaches, research and generally in the culture of relations, affects, conjectures and in politics of objective thinking, which is necessary conditions for personal, family and social survival. This phenomenon could determine the general diffusion of the brain thalamus- frontal cortex projections links loss as documented by neuro-biological research with the development of a “decerebrated” mankind. This is a real danger for democracy and the survival of mankind.
The person-centered theory of adolescence, a theory about human nature, proposes, for the next century, a generally semantic and linguistic revolution in human sciences, firstly in medicine and in psychology , based on the acceptance that human reality is necessarily built on the responsibility of being person in answering the question: “Is it true that this experience is good for me?”, and a posteriori connotating: “It is true that this experience has been good for me”.
This ending point corresponds to creating and perceiving propitious spaces and times (kairos) and to studying possibilities and resources for answering. I believe that this creation of propitious times as real possibilities for being human persons transcends the human being and is a necessary condition for the building a life culture.
This will be possible only if the Occident rediscovers its roots in the Person of Christ.
Key Words: Adolescence, Person centered theory, Epistemology, Possibility, Brain.
1. Correspondence to: Prof. Giuseppe R. Brera, Università Ambrosiana, V.le Romagna 51, 20133 Milano (Italy). E-mail: gbrera@unambro.it.
