Page - 29 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Psychosexual development in puberty 29 Arrogance” (1957b, 86). The case study of Mark (Diem -Wille 2004) depicts one adolescent’s narcissistic defense against vulnerability. In most cases, arrogance in puberty represents a thin façade covering great insecurity, vulnerability and sexual fears. When the feelings behind this façade are addressed in therapy, this façade collapses and the adolescent bursts into desperate tears. From the practical standpoint, this collapse of this unstable defense is not a favorable development, since the sudden absence of his protective defense (arrogance or belligerence) delivers the adolescent up to his massive feelings, rendering him even more fear- ful and usually resulting in his breaking off the therapy. The analyst then must ask herself whether her own feelings were at work, albeit unnoticed, behind her “correct interpretation” – which although correct, was per- haps not made in the right moment or with the right words. Could this “correct interpretation” be an expression of the analyst’s turbulent, envious affective reac- tion to the adolescent’s appearance or provocations? Here she must ask how she deals with her aging body and the aging process, particularly when confronted with the adolescent’s fresh beauty and charming body language. The narcissistic adolescent’s insecurity as to whether his parents “wanted” him can become blown out of proportion – and concealed behind an arrogant attitude where other people are discounted, with the adolescent presented in an arrogant and distanced light. The narcissist’s motto is: I don’t need anybody, I am enough for myself, I can satisfy myself sexually – for then I become invulnerable and independent. Even with sick people, there exists an – often small – healthy part with which the therapist attempts to establish a working relationship. The extreme tension between dependence and vulnerability that is always part of love contrasts with arrogant independence. Can I allow proximity if it renders me vulnerable and fragile? Can I bear the psychic pain of unrequited love? Crass reactions to insufficient bonding (“attacks on linking”, as Bion termed it in 1959) provoke extreme reactions of withdrawal: in autism, a person creates his own world, a refuge promising safety from harm and frustration, without any link to the outer world (Alvarez and Reid 1999). Or the fragmented parts of the self could not be transformed to thoughts through the containment embodied in a loving relationship, and paranoid -schizoid mechanisms took the upper hand. The lack of established, stable emotional relationships can be observed in schizo- phrenic children, whose bizarre and dismissive behavior reveals the unconscious aspiration to re -establish the experience of social interaction through their testing borders between the senses and reality, between words and their social signifi- cance. All undesired feelings and thoughts are projected outward. Puberty’s wild explosion of desires and sexual fantasies revives Oedipal desires and early unresolved conflicts regarding separation from the mother, which appear threatening and insoluble. If the adolescent cannot meet his developmental chal- lenges, a psychic collapse can ensue. When he experiences psychic restructuring through therapeutic help, the unconscious conflicts from early childhood can be investigated and sorted out. According to the experienced psychoanalyst Moses Laufer, who led the Brent Adolescent Center in London, this constitutes the last