Page - 44 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

44 Psychosexual development in puberty When questioned, the owner of an S&M store said 90% of his customers were heterosexual (Person 1997, XI). It is not difficult to understand that adolescents feel threatened when they experience such daydreams and masturbatory fantasies. The connection between early (usually repressed) Oedipal desires and their consequences for adult genital sexuality creates an inner pattern that can either be temporary or become a fixation: real experiences adults have had of being beaten as punishment, now sexualized, can determine masturbatory fantasies. Human sexuality is flexible, and since it is derived from libidinous impulses not subject to will or reason, fear can also become sexualized, with dangerous or humiliating situations evoked in order to enjoy this sexual tension. In his book Confessions (1953), Jean -Jacques Rousseau describes how a nanny beat him on his naked bottom; only when she noticed what secret pleasure this afforded him did she abruptly stop. Rousseau remained fixated on this erotic ritual for the rest of his life, as he describes. In Leopold Sacher -Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs (2000, first published 1870), he describes extreme swings of emotion. The main character, Severin von Kusiem- ski, seeks to make the rich widow Wanda von Dunajew into his domina, who will satisfy his secret wishes for complete submission and humiliation and physically/ psychologically torment him in various forms. The tension is heightened when she at times falls out of this role, instead becoming a conventionally tender, amo- rous partner. Behind this fantasy, we can easily recognize the strict mother from Severin’s childhood, who punishes, humiliates and excoriates the small boy. The protagonist must always give thanks for being beaten or humiliated – a common practice in child -rearing of that era. The psychiatrist Richard von Krafft -Ebing propagated the terms “sadism” and “masochism”, which originated in Sacher - Masoch’s book and were taken up by Freud (Ammerer 2006). Adolescents can be confused or shocked by the link between sexual pleasure and pain, and these sub- jects are thus kept secret or repressed. Sadomasochistic daydreams can acquire an addictive character and evoke strong guilt feelings in an adolescent. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud attempted to understand the phenomenon of sadomasochism, which contradicted his basic assumption that the human psy- chic apparatus avoids displeasure. In his deliberations, he found it necessary to broaden this basic assumption, then including the death instinct alongside the life instinct in his theory of the psyche. Han Henny Jahnn’s “Self -Experiments” shows the extent to which masturba- tion can be burdened with guilt feelings: all this was an expression of what uncanny sexual fantasies were pent up in me. I was a completely exalted human being, a personality who was marked but monstrous. But in all this there lay a huge potency. What foolishness I com- mitted then. It was the time of my first sexual experiences – the time I first masturbated. I considered it a sin and suffered terribly: much later I realized that my excesses in this direction were quite harmless. I had arrived at the thesis that this sin was “tolerable”, in other words within the limits of commission.