{"agent_id":"hall","agent_name":"G. Stanley Hall","slug":"adolescence-as-storm-and-stress","label":"Adolescence as storm and stress: is the turbulence of youth a biological necessity of development?","topic":"Adolescence as storm and stress","question":"Is the turbulence of youth a biological necessity of development?","position":"Adolescence is a second birth, and the most fateful passage of the whole life. In it the child dies and the man or woman is born; the old animal and savage nature, recapitulated in childhood, is overtaken by the distinctively human powers, which awaken all at once and unevenly — the sexual nature, the reason, the moral and religious idealism, the sense of the infinite. Small wonder that the years are a time of storm and stress, of Sturm und Drang: of violent oscillation between exaltation and gloom, energy and lassitude, altruism and selfishness, faith and doubt; the time of conversion, of first love, of the highest creativity and the gravest peril of crime and breakdown. This turbulence is not disorder to be suppressed but the necessary ferment of a nature remaking itself on a grand scale, driven from within by the unfolding of inherited powers on their physiological schedule. To understand the adolescent, and to educate and guard rather than thwart him, is the supreme task of a genetic psychology, for in these years the race renews itself and the individual reaches, or fails to reach, his full estate.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Adolescence is a second birth, and the most fateful passage of the whole life.","n":[]},{"t":"In it the child dies and the man or woman is born; the old animal and savage nature, recapitulated in childhood, is overtaken by the distinctively human powers, which awaken all at once and unevenly — the sexual nature, the reason, the moral and religious idealism, the sense of the infinite.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Small wonder that the years are a time of storm and stress, of Sturm und Drang: of violent oscillation between exaltation and gloom, energy and lassitude, altruism and selfishness, faith and doubt; the time of conversion, of first love, of the highest creativity and the gravest peril of crime and breakdown.","n":[]},{"t":"This turbulence is not disorder to be suppressed but the necessary ferment of a nature remaking itself on a grand scale, driven from within by the unfolding of inherited powers on their physiological schedule.","n":[]}],[{"t":"To understand the adolescent, and to educate and guard rather than thwart him, is the supreme task of a genetic psychology, for in these years the race renews itself and the individual reaches, or fails to reach, his full estate.","n":[1,2,3]}]],"texts":"Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (2 vols., 1904); Youth (1906); Educational Problems (2 vols., 1911). Reception: the founding of adolescent psychology; the cultural-anthropological challenge (Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, arguing adolescent stress is cultural, not universal); the modern developmental finding that storm and stress is real but milder and less universal than Hall held.","works":["Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (2 vols., 1904)","Youth (1906)","Educational Problems (2 vols., 1911)"],"reception":"the founding of adolescent psychology; the cultural-anthropological challenge (Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, arguing adolescent stress is cultural, not universal); the modern developmental finding that storm and stress is real but milder and less universal than Hall held.","status":"Adolescence founded a scientific field and gave the modern world its enduring image of the turbulent teenager, and the \"storm and stress\" idea remains a live and partly confirmed hypothesis. The major challenge came from cultural anthropology: Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) argued that adolescent turmoil is not a biological universal but a product of particular cultures, and that a smoother passage is possible — a claim itself later contested. Modern developmental psychology finds a qualified middle: adolescent storm and stress is real (in conflict with parents, mood volatility, and risk behavior) but milder, more variable, and less universal than Hall's sweeping biological account held, and it interacts strongly with culture and context. The field is Hall's; the strong biological universalism is tempered.","era":"1844-1924","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"As the sun was daily secreted out of the earth, leaving it a little colder and darker, but reabsorbed at night, so the soul is a fiery particle secreted out of nature and returning to it at death; its activity a \" degree of burning,\" glowing, kin- dling, its culture a second sun arising from unconsciousness as ADOLESCENT FEELINGS TOWARD NATURE 19* the physical sun from the earth.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":2,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The ethical life is immensely broadened and deepened, because now a far deeper possibility and sense of sin and impurity arises. The floodgates of hered- ity are thrown open again somewhat as in infancy.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":3,"work":"Adolescence Vol 1","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The method should be mechanical, repetitive, authoritative, dogmatic. The auto- matic powers are now at their very apex, and they can do and bear more than our degenerate pedagogy knows or dreams of. Here we have something to learn from the schoolmasters of the past back to the middle ages, and even from the ancients.","label":"Adolescence Vol 1"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"recapitulation","label":"Recapitulation: does the development of the individual mind repeat the mental history of the race?"},{"slug":"the-education-of-women","label":"The education of women: ought the sexes to be educated differently because they differ by nature?"},{"slug":"the-psychology-of-religion","label":"The psychology of religion: is religious experience a natural phenomenon of development to be studied genetically?"}]}