Page - 26 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

26 Psychosexual development in puberty sexual excitement, which is new to the adolescent and causes him fear; often unplanned, this excitement can overcome him against his own will. The fear of not recognizing one’s own body and its reactions is mixed with desire and inflamed sexual excitement, demanding its own intensification. In phases of infatuation, lovers often find it essential to maintain virtually uninterrupted body contact – touching hands or feet under the table. Eye contact The body language of love is expressed through corporal proximity. A mother, too, cannot “see enough” of her baby, as she gazes upon it during diapering and nurs- ing; baby and mother often seem to dissolve into one another. The human being is the only mammal who immediately seeks eye contact with its mother after birth. Protracted wordless gazes constitute either a sign of heightened intimacy or of aggression, as a ritual of initiation before fighting (Stern 2001, 219). A baby who continually avoids eye contact with its mother shows that their relationship is fundamentally disturbed (Norman 2004, 255ff ). Autistic children who have with- drawn into their private world avoid all eye contact, since they have no hope of establishing an emotional relationship to other people. The loving eye contact between mother and child also satisfies part drives, including voyeurism and exhi- bitionism, which are part of normal development in the construction of an emo- tional relationship. Refusal to look at another person can constitute a sharp form of punishment, leading to disorientation for a small child. “I don’t want to look at you” is a powerful and cruel weapon that can leave deep wounds in the child. A baby has the natural capacity to follow its mother with its gaze as she moves about the room, which helps it to bear separation from her since their emotional bond is sustained. A sensitive mother can maintain eye/voice contact to her baby even while performing other household tasks. Eyes are of major significance in romantic love: they are the first medium of contact – gazing, glancing or catching a gaze are often -employed methods for flirting. The excitement that makes another person attractive or beautiful is con- veyed through their eyes. Freud wrote: The eye is perhaps the zone most remote from the sexual object, but it is the one which, in the situation of wooing an object, is liable to be the most fre- quently stimulated by the particular quality of excitation whose cause, when it occurs in a sexual object, we describe as beauty. (For the same reason the merits of a sexual object are described as “attractions”). (Freud 105, 209) Freud maintains that the rubric “beautiful” must be grounded in sexual excitement and have originally denoted sexual attractiveness. As the body became increas- ingly concealed over the course of civilization, this vitalized sexual curiosity – then sublimated in art, which manages to sustain interest in the entire body. Melzer