Page - 22 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

22 Psychosexual development in puberty sexual tensions striving towards fulfillment, and thus become especially confus- ing and threatening. An adolescent goes through the various stages of psychosexual development once again, but this time with a new intensity. At the deepest level, psychosexual development is linked to the experience of separation from the womb in the first three months of life – and in turn, to giving up a fantasized omnipotence and con- trol of the love object (the mother). Here, the baby must integrate the different part aspects of the mother to a whole person, thus experiencing the loved and hated parts of the mother and of the self, formerly split in its fantasy, as belonging to one person. A second level is linked to the turbulent Oedipal desires for the parent of the opposite sex until the age of six, and the third level is linked to the consolida- tion that takes place in latency, between the ages of seven and eleven. In writing this chapter, I found it very difficult to describe a simple idea: that during puberty, every phase of development becomes newly agitated, and that each phase proves to be either stable or in need of modification or collapse. For weeks I tried to find various ways I could capture these thoughts. I was over- whelmed by the complexity of the task: first, to sketch all the preceding psychic and cognitive developmental phases, the two modes of experience comprised in the mature and the archaic view of the world, primary objects and of oneself. This seemed at first well -nigh impossible, since these matters must be presented simultaneously as occurring in their original stages from childhood and in their new manifestation during adolescence. Only when I realized that my feelings of being over -challenged by the unlimited scope of this basic idea corresponded to the feelings of adolescents themselves, living through this process, did I regain my confidence. The transformation from childhood to adulthood is an everyday matter – and yet constitutes a huge, emotionally challenging task: it is both simple and impossible. My description must of necessity remain an incomplete sketch, and for every step of the way, knowledge of all other aspects is a prerequisite. During the following description, the reader must always be aware that all aspects are simultaneously in play, even when they can only be described separately. 2.1 The mother -baby couple as a model for romantic love The first loving relationship develops between mother and baby, and they con- stitute a love pair – an experience laying the foundation for the romantic love which will come later. A baby seeking love and protection is often abruptly over- come by its own primitive rage and hate when it cannot control its mother (or a part aspect of her) in accordance with its fantasies of omnipotence. Immediate measures taken to gratify its wishes – basically impossible to satisfy since total satisfaction is never immediately possible – must necessarily lead to frustration. Further developments depend on whether the mother is capable of noticing and appropriating these primitive sensations and becoming emotionally involved with her baby. Only when she is capable of emotionally digesting these primitive