Page - 7 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

The body ego 7 Brizendine holds chemical changes – effects of the estrogen level in the female body – responsible for this behavior (Figure 1.1). The psychoanalytic perspective focuses on an adolescent’s inner world and asks which early experiences become revived in adolescent behavior. Gazing hap- pily into a mirror is hardly innate – it constitutes a result of learning from experi- ence. Only when a baby or young child has had the experience of being lovingly observed by its father or mother can it internalize a positive self -image. The child experiences: “I am worth loving; I can make my mother’s eyes shine”. Indeed, the baby is metaphorically mirrored in its mother’s eyes, which function something like a lovingly focused mirror in which the baby views itself. Winnicott asks: What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. (Winnicott 1967, 110) A mother’s eyes express her feelings towards her baby: if she loves her child, she looks at it lovingly, but if she is full of agitation or depression, her gaze is stiff and seems to pass through her child. The child’s gaze then cannot establish contact to its mother, just as the child cannot feel contained or accepted. André Green (1993) described how a baby might experience its depressed mother, with her empty, expressionless gaze, now devoid of her pre -depression vitality; as Green puts it, the child experiences his mother as “dead” – physically present, but looking exclusively inward, without a mother’s loving gaze at her infant. Green’s concept of the “dead mother” describes the baby’s experience of its mother in depression, as opposed to her normal self. Inside this child, a “spiritual hole” arises where there was hitherto space for the love object (mother). The gaze and attempted contact are no longer possible; the child is left to its own devices and must hold Period 1 7 14 21 28 Period Cycles * * Period begin – Period ends Highest verbal, intimacy and sex drive Estrogen Progesterone Ovulation Progesterone WavesEstrogen Waves Figure 1.1 Estrogen -progesterone waves (from Brizendine 2006)