Page - 32 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

32 Psychosexual development in puberty During adolescence, however, the boy now discovers that he has a powerful penis, and he is distraught and fearful over what he could do to his mother with his penis. He is fearful because he feels destructive and confused. In this turbulent phase of development, the boy fantasizes himself to a greater or lesser extent as part of another couple. He subjugates himself to a “king” and selects him as a love object. In his fantasy, his mother is rejected or killed, with only he and his father remaining, who rule the world. Freud called this configuration “negative Oedipus”. Human bisexuality renders both constellations possible and lays the foundation for later same -sex love relationships or friendships. In this developmental phase, the girl finds herself in a more complex situation. The girl also experiences her first love relationship with her mother and must alter this priority as she turns to her father as a love object of the opposite sex. “I would like to marry daddy”, thinks (or says) the girl, and then plays that she will get many, many babies (with her father). These games are seldom played with her mother, but instead with an aunt or grandmother: they are more likely to grant her the “king” than her mother, who in her fantasy is jealous. Freud assumed that the girl turns away from her mother when she discovers that her mother did not provide her with the desired penis. The wish to bear chil- dren was interpreted by Freud as an ersatz for the withheld penis. Today, psy- choanalysis proceeds from the assumption that a girl is well aware of her vagina and that the wish to have children is of great significance not only for girls but also for boys. Melanie Klein (1945) speaks of “womb and vagina envy”, char- acterizing this phase in a boy’s life as a “femininity phase”. Yet the girl’s partial emotional distancing from the mother as primary love object gives rise to deep feelings of guilt (Chasseguet -Smirgel 1974). The wish to outdo the maternal rival can be far stronger than with boys, since the mother as original love object is now replaced. These wishes are often repressed, split and projected outwards: the mother becomes the envious person who is unable to admit the girl’s triumph vis - à -vis the father, begrudging her beauty and attractiveness, persecuting the beauti- ful princess, even wishing to poison her like the evil Queen poisons Snow White; this fantasy is an alternative to its opposite pole, where the girl wishes to see her mother as old and needy, cranky and unattractive. In the back of the girl’s mind, she realizes that with her small, breastless body, she is not truly capable of mak- ing a baby with her father, and although this realization is sad, it is also calming. However, the situation suddenly changes with the girl’s first menstruation, since she now possesses the necessary biological equipment, causing not only her but her father enormous anxiety. The sudden ceasing of all physical contact between the adolescent girl and her father can be traced to this unconscious fear. Teenage pregnancy – which will be discussed later – represents a form of acting out and displacing these conflict -ridden wishes. Due to the necessity of the early break between mother and daughter, their relationship is much more conflict -ridden than the relationship between the boy and his father. The girl feels inadequate and reproaches herself for harboring these wishes against her beloved mother to whom she owes so much; this often leads to a poor self -image.