Page - 35 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Psychosexual development in puberty 35 This all becomes altered through the adolescent’s developmental burst, with pressure arising from two sides. Due to his sexual development, early Oedipal wishes are revived, and simultaneously the search for an identity demands that the adolescent poses fundamental questions of parental ideals and values. The search for a sexual partner also demands giving up the early parental love objects and replacing them with new objects of sexual desire. This paradoxical situation consists in the adolescent desiring his parent of the opposite sex with a new intensity, and yet preparing for a thorough dis- tancing in order to free herself for a love object of the same age. The male adolescent who wishes to make babies with his mother would be physically capable of this, which creates enormous unconscious fears. What was for- merly a harmless, childish wish now becomes a threatening goal. The male adolescent’s fear often leads to violent actions in order to be rid of this inner pressure. By the same token, the female adolescent’s wish to have her father’s baby is now a real possibility. Even though the distaste for incest will pre- vent this wish from being fulfilled, it can become reality in a displaced form, through teenage pregnancy. These contradictory demands create great tension, which can be manifested in self -destructive behavior such as cutting, thoughts of suicide, psychic break- down or retreat from reality. The threatening nature of incipient physical changes is demonstrated in Kafka’s Metamorphoses (1915). Here, a young man named Gregor Samsa perceives how his body slowly takes on the form of a beetle, with his hope that this change is only temporary soon to be disappointed: he must accept that the change is permanent. An adolescent must also change every aspect of his relationship to himself – his views, wishes and goals – which we in fact call the process of adolescence. The balance of the latency years is lost. Indeed, it seems to be those young people who have the inner strength and resource to bear to continue the experience of being naturally out of balance, as well as an environment that can support this, who can achieve the best adjustment in adult life. (Anderson 1998, 3) In a family where parents prepare themselves and their children for the stormy period of adolescence, the younger brother may ask his sister – already in puberty and fighting her parents – “When will I finally enter puberty?” He may expect the requisite changes in his body, but their intensity can hardly be imagined. Various views prevail as to whether the Oedipus complex constitutes a com- mon, necessary phase of development or a pathological element. Britton (2014) emphasizes that the fashion in which an adolescent overcomes this developmen- tal phase has a particular influence on the individual pattern of the personality, contending that when the Oedipal situation is newly experienced in every new life situation over the course of one’s life, then this experiencing is useful and fruitful for psychic developmental and spiritual growth. However, when every new experience of a triangular situation evokes regressive tendencies, causing the