Page - 17 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

The body ego 17 demonstrating a woman’s power to bear human life and give birth. The procreative capability of the man is demonstrated through his first “wet dream”, but this phenom- enon is more private, less noticed or acknowledged in the social realm. In conclusion, I would like to describe a phenomenon observed by Bruno Bettelheim with his emotionally deeply disturbed children in the Sonia Shankman Orthogenetic School. In his book Symbolic Wounds, Bruno Bettelheim hypothesized that “one sex feels envy in regard to the sexual organs and functions of the other” (Bettelheim 1962, 19). Initiation rites can be understood as an attempt to express envy of womanhood through rituals. Self -injury is meant to result in a bleeding similar to menstruation. In the Sonia Shankman Orthogenetic School for emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago, founded by Bettelheim, several professionals noticed that adolescents were damaging their genitals in order to make them bleed. These spontaneous “rites of initiation” on the part of 12 - and 13 -year -old girls and boys started as a secret club with the plan of cutting their genitals once a month to mix the blood together (see Bettelheim 1962, 30). The schizophrenic girls exhibited various reactions to their own menstruation: they viewed the blood as “disgust- ing” or “dirty”, yet they spoke almost exclusively of menstruation and showed the others their sanitary napkins. All the boys under his care saw it as a “cheat” or “gyp” that they had no vagina. (Some even said: “Why can’t I have a vagina?”) When somebody else was crying, one boy said: “I know why he’s crying – it’s because he wants to have a vagina” (Bettelheim 1962, 30), “Viewing menstrua- tion not as something debilitating but as something that confers extraordinary magic powers may make genital sexuality more acceptable. The new power again makes men seem less enviable and dangerous and sexual intercourse with them less hazardous” (Ibid, 51). Based on his analysis of various rites of initiation, Bettelheim posits the thesis that such rites can be understood as a somewhat hid- den fascination centered on pregnancy and giving birth. In all phases of puberty, the body also becomes a medium for protest, provocation and propaganda. Although manifestations thereof vary markedly in the 20th and 21st centuries, adolescents have always attempted to gain hegemony over their bod- ies, which in itself often constitutes a provocation for parents and teachers. 1.2 The body as a medium of protest, provocation and propaganda The transformation of the child’s body into that of an adult transforms the adoles- cent’s sense of his body along with its structure. Attendant insecurity and shame is often turned outwards in the form of provocation, reversed into the opposite pole: instead of a transformed but concealed body, the body becomes an agent for protest – in conscious contrast to more “adult” modes of presentation. In Figure 1.3, the two adolescent boys are presenting their attractive, mature bodies in a regressive and provocative fashion – on the one hand reminiscent of babies exhibiting their behinds, and on the other hand like a broken taboo, as they shamelessly expose their rear ends.