Page - 25 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Psychosexual development in puberty 25 take care of himself and will manage everything on his own – he knows to get home punctually, for instance. This constellation is reminiscent of the child’s first separation out of the initial amorous couple: the mother and her baby. Discovering the body After birth, the mother and father investigate their baby’s body, stroking it lov- ingly, squeezing its fingers and toes, inspecting its head, eyes and ears, as they compare it with their fantasies of an imaginary baby. The English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott characterizes the “shine in its mother’s eyes” as an essential component of “primary maternity” for a baby. Psychoana- lysts assume that the parents’ affectionate gaze and tender stroking convey to their baby steadiness and protection. A lover, too, undertakes a similar voyage of discovery over the beloved’s body, caressing it and holding it. This touching unconsciously evokes the same pleas- ant feelings from early childhood – this time, making tangible the lovers’ mutual pleasure in their skin and bodies. As it passes over the partner’s body, a lover’s hand heightens sexual tension: If the excitation now spreads to another erotogenic zone – to the hand, for instance, through tactile sensations – the effect is the same: a feeling of pleas- ure on the one side, which is quickly intensified by pleasure arising from the preparatory changes (in the genitals), and on the other side an increase of sexual tension, which soon passes over into the most obvious unpleasure if it cannot be met by a further accession of pleasure. . . . If an erotogenic zone in a person who is not sexually excited (e.g. the skin of a woman’s breast) is stimulated by touch, the contact produces a pleasurable feeling; but it is at the same time better calculated than anything to arouse a sexual excitation that demands an increase of pleasure. (Freud 1905, 209) In her “Ensemble, c’est tout” (2004), Anna Gavalda describes the discovery of the body of the lovers: He consumed her from head to foot. . . . At first he fell upon her freckles, then nibbled, picked at, chewed, licked, swallowed, ate up, fed himself, bit and gnawed at her to her bones. (Gavalda 2004, 467, translation McQuade) She then describes how the woman also gets to know her lover’s body, “she too acquired the same taste, paying him back in kind.” For adolescents, these sensations are confusing in two ways: first, uncon- scious memories of early bodily sensations arise that were hitherto successfully repressed; second, everything in an adolescent’s body aims towards increasing