Adolescence was formally recognized in 1904 by G. Stanley Hall

Evidence

Adolescence was officially “discovered” in the United States in 1904 by G. Stanley Hall, and even then, Hall, the first doctor of psychology in the country, located the challenges of youth in the rapidly changing context of “our urbanized hothouse life that tends to ripen everything before its time.” While writing about teenagers in 1904, he observed that adolescence is a period of extreme orientation toward the peer group: “Some seem for a time to have no resource in themselves, but to be abjectly dependent for their happiness upon their mates.” He also pointed to the potential for cruelty within the peer group, a phenomenon that contemporary psychologists refer to as “relational aggression.” Decades later, the central challenge of adolescence was famously characterized as “identity formation” by the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, who did much to explain twentieth-century adolescence. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1440

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how earlier chapters framed childhood itself as a historically recent invention — age-of-childhood historiography (Ariès) echoes here in the ‘discovery’ of adolescence.