114 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
always involves a loss of the status quo, individuals going through the many
biological changes of adolescence certainly experience maturational loss.Psychosocial Development
Piaget (1954) identified the hallmark of adolescence as the ability to engage in
abstract thinking; ideas themselves can be manipulated and the individual is
no longer reliant on seeing, hearing, or touching objects to consider their inter-
relationships. Erikson (1980) viewed the psychological task of adolescence as
the development of identity. During adolescence, individuals not only think
about who they are, but about how they appear to others. The developmen-
tal danger is identity confusion, the lack of an identity that is coherent and
distinct.
Along with a growing ability to see oneself through the eyes of others
and to consider how and why one adopts or rejects certain social roles, Erikson
(1980) emphasized the consolidation of ego identity and integration of a sense
of sameness, continuity, and congruency within one’s self-concept. According
to Erikson, many adolescents regard differences as faults. Although they view
themselves as unique and want to differentiate themselves from their family
of origin, they also want to fit in with their peers. Erikson observed that a
critical feature of adolescence is the tendency to view behavior as identity.
For instance, instead of saying that one did not get good grades one semester,
adolescents tend to invoke character deficits—“I’m a moron”—that they may
believe define who they are in a more permanent, persistent, and pervasive
manner than just having a bad semester. Seligman (1995) showed that attri-
bution of situations to permanent, pervasive, and persistent character traits
rather than to temporary circumstances tends to inspire a pessimistic attribu-
tional style that places adolescents at risk for depression and anxiety.
This tendency to attribute behavior to inherent personal traits may be
most harmful to teens who engage in risky behavior and may subsequently
be labeled with terms, such as delinquent, no-good, and loser. Such labels
can become self-fulfilling prophecies when the behavior is not understood
by authorities (or powerful peers) as the result of transitory circumstances.
Teens take in the identity message that they are durably “bad.” Erikson cau-
tioned: “[I]f diagnosed and treated correctly, seemingly psychotic and criminal
incidents do not in adolescence have the same fatal significance which they
have at other ages” (1980, p. 97). Thus, policies like charging lawbreaking
teens as adults and processing them in the adult justice system may cause
more problems than they remedy.
Identity development and adaptation plays a significant role in process-
ing loss. Sometimes the losses relate directly to identity: for example, a teen
who loses a mother may identify herself as a motherless daughter. Adolescents
who experience multiple losses may come to view themselves as “angels of
death,” as one young client did, not able to view the confluence of loss as out-
side of his control, but instead seeing it as connected to his very identity. The
vestiges of childhood’s magical thinking remain in adolescence and beyond.
Adolescents’ abstract thinking abilities are still rather new and they may
struggle to find a way to make meaning of death.