Page - 18 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

18 The body ego In every successive generation, divergence from the previous one has been exhib- ited in a different fashion. In the German -speaking countries, an early 20th -century adolescent Wandervogel youth movement expressed rebellion against bourgeois constraints through clothing, propounding a free life in harmony with nature instead of narrow sartorial restraints and militarism. The nude body was meant to inspire liberation from strictures and morality. With their guitars and knapsacks, these youths wandered the woods and sang romantic songs by the campfire. Neither these outward trappings and closeness to nature nor the protest against military drill kept the movement from being co -opted by a completely opposite, authority -oriented ideology. The youth movements between the two World Wars – such as the Wandervogel and the Pfadfinder – segued smoothly into paramilitary national movements and later into the Nazi Hitler Youth. Uniforms, boots and flags and powerful hierarchical structures took the place of the formerly freedom- loving, individualistic ethos. Wilhelm Reich made the disciplining of the body through military drill a central focus for examination. In 1950s Germany, what was called the “swinging 50s” (as distinct from the “swinging 60s”, both in Germany and elsewhere) swung the pendulum once again in the other direction: modest, tight -waisted, broad -belted petticoat dresses Figure 1.3 John with his friend (16 years old)