Youth as peril and promise: The emergence of adolescent psychology in postwar egypt

Abstract

A public discourse of 'youth crisis' emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, 'adolescence' had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly consolidated disciplinary space of psychology and was reconfigured as a psychological stage of social adjustment, sexual repression, and existential anomie. Adolescence'perceived as both a collective temporality and a depoliticized individual interiority'became a volatile stage linked to a psychoanalytic notion of sexuality as libidinal raw energy, displacing other collective temporalities and geographies. New discursive formations, for example, of a psychology centered on unconscious sexual impulses and a cavernous interiority, and new social types, such as the 'juvenile delinquent,' coalesced around the figure of adolescence in postwar Egypt. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.