Adolescence and Intelligence
I am Rekha Gupta, a professor in a management institution. My son, Rakesh, 15 years old, a student of the 11th grade is fairly intelligent and compliant. He has an avid interest in the various aspects of life. He has a lot of ambitions and is able to argue for or aginst any point. He sometimes shows a level of maturity that I find lacking in adults also. at the same time, he lacks consistency in his behavior. Because of the nature of his talks, I often trust him with responsibility and then repent because it is not fulfilled. I fail to understand why an intelligent person like Rakesh is unable to inspire the same amount of trust with his behavior.
An adolescent’s intelligence cannot be trusted to aid his behaviour. The fact that his understanding of and interest in the structure of society often far exceed those of later years does not assist him in the least to find his true place in social life, nor does the many-sidedness of his interests deter him from concentrating upon a single point – his preoccupation with his own personality. We must not suppose that an adolescent ponders on the various situations in love or on the choice of a profession in order to think out the right line of behaviour, as an adult might do or as a boy studies a piece of machinery in order to be able to take it to pieces and put it together again. Adolescent intellectuality seems merely to minister to daydreams.
Even the ambitious fantasies of that period are not intended to be translated into reality. When a young lad fantasies that he is a great conqueror, he does not on that account feel any obligation to give proof of his courage or endurance in real life. Similarly, he evidently derives gratification from the mere process of thinking, speculating or discussing. His behavior is determined by other factors and is not necessarily influenced by the results of these intellectual gymnastics. Moreover the intellectualization is also in order to gain superiority over the issues of conflict – putting sexual impulses into practice and renouncing them, between liberty and restraint, between revolt against and submission to authority. But it merely takes place in thought; it is an intellectual process. The abstract intellectual discussions and speculations in which young people delight are not genuine attempts at solving the tasks set by reality. Their mental activity is rather an indication of a tense alertness.
The philosophy of life which they construct – it may be their demand for revolution in the outside world – it is really their desire to revolutionize their own lives under the threat of new biological changes. Their ideas of friendship and undying loyalty are simply a reflection of the conflict about their relationship with their parents. The longing for guidance and support in the often hopeless battle against their own growth demands may be transformed into ingenious arguments about man’s ability to arrive at independent political decisions. On one hand, the young person tends to isolate himself; he lives with his family members as if he is living with strangers.
At the same time, self-isolation is also accompanied by passionate attachment to young people of his own age, or attachment to an older person, whom he takes as his leader and who is clearly a substitute for parents. While they last, they are exclusive but of short duration. Persons are selected and abandoned without any consideration for their feelings and others are chosen in their place preserving the details in the relationships with exactness to the new person. Thinking, we know, is an experimental kind of acting and exploration of desires with less expenditure of energy.
Therefore, a sudden spurt in intellectual activities at adolescence is a reflection of the tremendous amount of turmoil in this phase and a defensive attempt to master the desires and conflicts. In the periods of calm in the desires of life, when there is no danger, the individual can permit himself a certain degree of stupidity. It is the danger of desires that makes a human being intelligent. Objective danger and deprivations spur men on to intellectual feats and ingenious attempts to solve their difficulties, while objective security and superfluity tend to make them comfortably stupid. Thus the intellectual work performed by the mind is adult life is incomparably more solid and reliable, and above all, much more closely connected with action.
