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The Metamorphosis 97of peer relations. This mutuality is in turn the basis for the social contract in thelarger context of society.The young child is embedded in the juvenile attachment relation. The cognitiveand interpersonal orientation of this relation may be maintained throughout childhoodthrough a dominance of the dorsal limbic mode of learning and self-regulation.The metamorphosis signaled by the onset of puberty engages multiple mechanisms,but perhaps none as fundamental as the withdrawal from parental attachment throughnegativistic autonomy. This autonomy appears to be mediated by the ventral limbiccircuits mediating defensiveness and aggression. The motive scenario of adolescentindividuation not only recapitulates the infantile separation-individuation process,but forms an integral motive basis of adult individuation.The Origins of Consciousness in Peer RelationsWith peers, adolescents seem to engage other people for the first time. At least inearly adolescence, parents remain identified with the anachronistic childhoodcontext. They are thus perceived as familiar but largely inanimate instrumentalobjects, serving a purpose of providing a kind of dependable, inanimate support,like the living room couch. Because peers are understood to mirror their owncapacities for consciousness and intentionality, adolescents discover them as separate,sentient individuals. For those adolescents who individuate fully, there is nowthe capacity for exercising mutuality, in which the intentions of self and other canbe understood as alternative perspectives defining each event.The object relations theorists rightly emphasize the infantile exercises of understandingmutual intentionality with an effective parent as the requisite developmentalprocess to progress from narcissism to interpersonal mutuality. However,the progression within the family context in childhood only lays the foundation.It is in adolescent peer relations that the lessons of moving beyond egocentrismand narcissism are learned effectively. These are difficult lessons, and the tests ofcompetence are merciless. The unfortunate adolescents who fail these lessons arequickly relegated to the underclass of the peer culture. Whether successful or traumatizing,peer relations provide the adolescent with a more structured and complexconsciousness that was never possible for the child.The mechanisms for regulating both motive and cognition in this process ofunderstanding the abstract perspectives of interpersonal relations are the corticolimbicpathways. The dorsal pathway provides the holistic grasp of the interpersonalcontext, supporting in more extreme engagements the experiential fusionwith the other of the attachment relation. The ventral pathway provides the separationof the autonomous perspective in conflict with the shared context. Forthe adolescent who successfully individuates and explores new peer attachmentrelations, each social relation exercises these opposing perspectives. Successful