BLOS, PETER (1904-1997)

A German psychoanalyst with a degree in education and a

PhD in biology, Peter Blos was born February 2, 1904, in
Karlsruhe (Germany), and died June 12, 1997, in
Holderness, New Hampshire (United States). Blos's childhood
and adolescence were marked by the spiritual influence of his
father, a doctor drawn to Gandhi's ideas. Early in life he
became a friend of Erik Homburger, who later became the
psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Blos studied education at the
University of Heidelberg to become a teacher, and then
obtained a doctorate in biology in Vienna.

During the 1920s, he was introduced to Anna Freud, who

asked his help in creating a school for children undergoing
analysis. The project was supported and encouraged by Eva
Rosenfeld and Dorothy Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud,
whose children attended the small school. Blos invited Erik
Homburger to join him there. Within the Vienna
psychoanalytic circle August Aichhorn exerted considerable
intellectual influence on Blos, which strongly affected his
psychoanalytic training. Blos entered psychoanalysis through
teaching, while giving his work an orientation and sensitivity
influenced by spirituality.

To escape the rise of Nazism, Blos fled Vienna in 1934 for

the United States, where he settled in New Orleans. There he
was hired as a teacher in a private school, before leaving
for New York, where he continued his analytic training.
According to Aaron H. Esman, he became a member of
the New York Psychoanalytic Society, becoming a special
member in 1965 and then a supervisor and trainer. As a
teacher he introduced, in 1972, a course on delayed
adolescence, which he discontinued in 1977. He continued
his clinical practice and did some teaching at the Columbia
Psychoanalytic Center as cofounder of the Association of
Child Psychoanalysis. When he retired from professional life,
he spent his time writing poetry and fiction, playing the violin,
and practicing carpentry in his country home in
Holderness, New Hampshire. He died there at the age of
ninety-three, by the side of his second wife.

Of his four published books, it is On Adolescence: A

Psychoanalytic Interpretation that led to his national and
international recognition. This book, supported by his
extensive clinical experience with adolescents, picks up the
thread of an idea that Sigmund Freud failed to develop. Freud
identified the beginning and end of the process of puberty,
largely ignoring the intermediary stages. Blos decided to
elucidate the various stages of development of the
personality, from latency to post-adolescence. His goal was to
present a unified theory of adolescence, a necessary first
step in introducing an adolescent-specific psychopathology
and psychotherapeutic technique. Five years later he
developed a key concept, inherited from the work of Margaret
Mahler, the "second individuation process." Here, the
emphasis is on the importance of renegotiating the separation
with the parents' imagos during adolescence. The author
emphasizes the importance of gaining access to regression,
which, contrary to what occurs in the case of the infant and
the adult, is tied to the ego.

The second individuation process is what made Blos well-

known. His theoretical and clinical approach to the gradual
development of the personality, delinquency, and the
problems of the ego (superego, ego ideal, integrative
capability) also made a significant contribution to
understanding adolescence. In the United States he is
considered an eminent specialist, a forerunner of child and
adolescent analysis, who trained several generations of
analysts in adolescent psychotherapy.