Page - 5 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

The body ego 5 themselves for a change not only in size but also in strength. The body’s new form, an adolescent’s changed voice, newly developed primary and secondary sexual organs: all elicit a new sense of body, with the most essential difference consisting in the biological capacity for becoming a mother or father. As Anderson writes: “What we see clinically in adolescence is the way the body that the adolescent relates to is a container for a whole history of sexual and other primitive object relationships both dyadic and triadic” (Anderson 2009, 1). The adolescent’s mas- sive bodily growth is accompanied by an alteration in emotional balance, influ- encing the deepest layers of the personality. Many adolescents arriving in therapy exhibit somatic symptoms such as anorexia, drug abuse and self -harm (slashing, for example) – all indicating deep subconscious fears. Anderson feels that these often bizarre symptoms – that could otherwise point to borderline or psychotic phenomena – should instead be seen as an exaggerated form of normal alteration in the personality. Adolescents now perceive the necessity of defining themselves anew – not only as their parents’ son or daughter, but taking their own place in the world, becoming a potential husband or wife and acquiring the capacity for intimacy and sexuality in a close relationship. These tasks must be accomplished during a time when the deepest wishes and passions from early childhood are revived. Adolescents must embark on a love relationship to someone of their own age and renounce earlier desires for their parent of the opposite sex. The adolescent must reorder his inner life. Contradic- tory wishes exists parallel to one another. The wish to be loved, cared for and nourished – and to possess the source of these qualities – is accompanied by the wish to become independent and attain a better, more interesting place in the world. We will examine the adolescent’s emo- tional and mental development in later chapters. First, we turn in more detail to physical alterations – not forgetting that both the secretion of hormones and atten- dant physical changes will awaken and intensify emotional and mental conflicts. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud writes of the changes puberty brings: With the arrival of puberty, changes set in which are destined to give infan- tile sexual life its final, normal shape. The sexual instinct has hitherto been predominantly auto -erotic; it now finds a sexual object. Its activity has hith- erto been derived from a number of separate instincts and erotogenic zones, which, independently of one another, have pursued a certain sort of pleasure as their sole sexual aim. Now, however, a new sexual aim appears, and all the component instincts combine to attain it, while the erotogenic zones become subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone. (Freud 1905, 206) Particularly characteristic for this developmental phase is the setting of new pri- orities, where erogenous zones such as the mouth, skin and anal area – as well as pleasurable observing and gazing – are all subordinated to the goal of sexual