Acting Out and the Narrative Function: Reconsidering Peter Blos’s Concept of the Second Individuation Process

The role and meaning of narratives in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy has begun to be explored over the past few years. Little, if any, of this material has been related to adolescent psychotherapy and it is the purpose of this paper to make some preliminary inquiries into how narratives might operate in this sphere. To explore this hypothesis, Peter Blos’s ideas on adolescent acting out are related to a theory of narrative developed by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Bios conceives of adolescent acting out as a part of attempts by adolescents to develop a coherent identity in what he refers to as a second individuation process. A link is proposed between adolescent acting out and Ricoeur’s notion of narrative as the structure that undergirds the process of identity formation.