Page - 27 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Psychosexual development in puberty 27 (1988) takes up this idea and extends it, speaking of “aesthetic experience”. With this, he means the overpoweringly passionate love for the mother, a “beautiful mother”, where all the child’s loving, tender and happy experiences come together in an image. The image of a beautiful mother can be undermined through painful, frustrating or disappointing experiences, rendering the baby skeptical and dis- trustful. Isca Salzberger -Wittenberg, a pioneer of psychoanalytic baby observa- tion in the method of Esther Bick, writes: Observations show how much the infant responds from moment to moment to the mother’s changing emotional state: her love at one moment, her anger at another; her depression, her inner deadness, anxiety, fragility, her being preoccupied, out of touch with him – all these are sensed and arouse in him, in turn, love, admiration, fear, as well as concern. (Salzberger -Wittenberg 2013, 28) The anxiety elicited in an adolescent from a desirous, admiring gaze is depicted by Turrini in his collection of poems, Im Namen der Liebe (In the Name of Love) (2005, 11) in the chapter “The Burning Heart”: A look to you And I see Such beauty Such shyness Such temperament Such courage. What will I see When I risk A second look? (Translation McQuade) Turrini is describing a twofold risk: whether the girl reciprocates his gaze and shows interest in him; and what might occur inside him as his sexual excitement rises or his knees tremble, overcome and enslaved as he is by her beauty. The language of lovers The language of the first mother -infant pair (a universal phenomenon across many cultures) is called “baby talk”, marked by an exaggeratedly melodic cadence, high voice and pauses between sentences. Even though a baby might not comprehend the content of what is said to him, he takes in the mood, emotional message and basic syntactic structure, answering with facial gestures or noises in place of words. “An infant’s searching look also is an expression of something. His joyful or fretful excitation when undressed is also information. His screaming – with