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88 CHARACTERISTICS OF BRAIN AND BEHAVIORimportantly, undefined. Impending adulthood, and childhood’s end, are experiencednonetheless, with the unceremonious and abrupt sexual maturation of a yearor so of puberty and the corresponding hormonal differentiation of the brain.The adolescent thus awakens as a stranger in a strange body, moving in a familiarbut now strangely foreign land, and—strangest of all—for the first timeacutely self-aware. Facing a vacuum where an identity should be, it is time to castaround for a new self. To transition from the globally dependent juvenile state ofchildhood requires mechanisms of individuation that make up perhaps the mostimportant components of the adolescent’s self-regulatory capacity. For manyadolescents, autonomy is achieved not just by self-consciousness, and not just byself-direction, but by rebellion. This is a rebellion not just against parents andteachers and their restrictive role definitions. In the true sense of dialectical negation,it is a rebellion against the childhood self.The result is a neuropsychological transformation, a new, more explicit self. Atheory of adolescent identity-formation must address the critical mechanisms ofindividuation that achieve this transformation. The theory must then describe thenew forms of attachment that are incumbent with the adult role.We will first consider the challenge of individuation in adolescence within apsychological framework, that of developmental psychoanalytic theory. We thenconsider the neural foundations of these psychological processes, reasoningthrough a corticolimbic model of the mechanisms of attachment and individuation.In this model, the motive mechanisms of social relations include both thehedonic valuation of attachment and the anxiety and defensiveness of autonomyand individuation. The limbic networks regulating these motive mechanisms arethe same networks that direct the corticolimbic operations of memory consolidation.Because of this, we can see how the exercise of autonomy and attachmentprovide essential foundations for the neuropsychological processes of conceptualdifferentiation and integration.Interpersonal Differentiation of the SelfAmong the powerful theoretical tools offered over the years by psychoanalysts,perhaps the most important was the historical, developmental analysis of personality.It was in fact the actual observation of children, beginning with Anna Freud’s(1958) studies at the Hampstead War Nursery and Rene Spitz’s (1945) studies ofmaternal deprivation in prison nurseries, that provided the interpretive basis forthe modern psychoanalytic approach to the self. It is not just that adult relationshipsare formed on the basis of childhood relation templates; rather, the adultself is literally constructed from these internalized templates. These are the objectrelations (Guntrip, 1969; Winnicott, 1964). The key themes in this constructionof self are attachment (Bowlby, 1969) and separation (Bowlby, 1973). Thesethemes are carried from childhood experience to be woven into each of the adult’sefforts at actualizing the self in current interpersonal relationships.