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The Metamorphosis 872003). In common chimpanzees, it is females who separate from the family groupand leave to find other social groups when they become sexually mature. In socialmammals generally, sexual maturation requires a kind of transformation ofsocial role marked by a radical shift from juvenile dependency toward the individuationof adult behavior. In order to avoid incestuous reproduction, the maturingoffspring must separate from the birth group and establish adult roles in a newfamily or social context. In this general requirement to reject childhood attachmentsand motives and to assume adult ones, human adolescence is no different.The difference may be one of ontogenetic complexity, in which the modernhuman child has traversed a decade of rich cultural exposure with a highly plasticand adaptive brain. The result is a differentiated and complex neuropsychologicalorganization, a self. Yet the child’s self is larval, one that retains a juvenileimmaturity. The child has the capacity for learning through play, but only a nascentcapacity for extended, focused work. He or she is oriented to the global attachmentcontext of childhood, but not to the sex-specific attachment roles ofmating and parenting. The child may gain an extensive knowledge base, but hasonly rudimentary capacity for abstract reasoning. He or she may engage in occasionalself-reflection, and the implicit childhood self is a fundamental basis forexperience and behavior. But the child is typically self-conscious only briefly, incontrast to the acute and chronic self-consciousness associated with the adolescent’semerging individuation of an adult identity.We propose that the psychological explanation of adolescence must address twocentral issues. The first is the development of abstract intelligence. The second isthe development of a conscious and autonomous identity. These may be relateddevelopments. Within 2 or 3 years of puberty, most adolescents show a remarkableincrease in the capacity for representing events and situations with abstractand insightful concepts. This is a remarkable growth period of intelligence, onethat must rival other profound cognitive transformations, such as toddler languageacquisition. In addition, by the time that young adulthood is achieved, most adolescentshave differentiated a representation of the self that will define many significantexperiences and actions throughout life. This construct of identity is aunique representation, allowing the adolescent a reference for experience andactions that is self-organizing in a way that was largely implicit and unconsciousfor the child. Many of the striking psychiatric disturbances of adolescence reflectfailures to achieve the coherence of an adult self, and these failures are oftenmanifested in obsessive and distorted attempts at self-understanding.We propose that, because of the extended neural plasticity of the human juvenileperiod, the transition to the adult form in humans represents a neuropsychologicalmetamorphosis, a reorganization of the self from a juvenile form into thefundamentally different neuropsychological form of an adult identity. The increasingcomplexity of culture, coupled with the loss of effective guidance from ritesof passage, has led modern adolescence to be challenging, extended, and, most