Psychological Aspects of Youths’ Aggressive Social Behaviour
[1]
Dimitris C. Anagnostopoulos, Hellenic Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Athens, Greece.
[2]
Dimitrios Anastasopoulos, Hellenic Association of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Athens, Greece.
[3]
Eugenia Soumaki, Hellenic Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Athens, Greece.
In December of 2008, a series of wide-spread protests led by youths took place. At first centred on Athens, quickly spread across the whole of Greece. The spark was the murder in cold blood of a 15-year-old student by a member of the police force. The extent of the phenomenon throughout the country, the massive, almost universal, participation of adolescents (students) and youths (university students, young working people) as well as the intensity and form of reactions, shaped a situation which had the characteristics of a spontaneous youth uprising. In this paper we try to understand the essence of these events from a psychodynamic perspective. This is why we examine issues such as the characteristics of adolescence, the adolescent and the family, the adolescent and the peer group, the adolescent and society, and finally, acting out as a form of communication. We conclude that the blurring of family boundaries, the weakening of social values, the predominance of the ideology of individualism and the ambivalent behaviour of adults under certain social conditions when institutional structures collapse, along with the older generations' incompetence and indifference for providing security against acts of violence, lead to the failure of “containment” of adolescents’ anxieties by the social environment. All these drive adolescents to express themselves mainly through the mechanism of acting out, and acts of violence are manifested with increasing frequency.
Adolescence, Family, Acting Out, Protest, Peer Group, Society, Greece
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