Page - 46 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

46 Psychosexual development in puberty lies in aesthetic satisfaction. Reading an impressive literary work, we experience a working through of psychic tensions, called by Freud the “fore -pleasure” or “incentive bonus” (Freud 1908a, 152). The spectator identifies himself with the work and the inner world of the artist as represented in the work. Hanna Segal (1952) further develops this idea when she assumes reparation to be the origin of all forms of creativity. She sees the aesthetic experience of beauty and harmony as the successful attempt to restore destroyed inner objects and link them to reality: “The artist communicates at the same time both the destruction of the internal world and the capacity to repair it” (Segal, as quoted in Quinodoz 2008, 23). In order to answer the question of how these destroyed inner objects come into being, a short detour is necessary. We have already seen that from birth on, the baby must cope with contradictory inner forces between the life and death instincts. The inner capacity to love is bal- anced against dark powers. The baby fears the effects of his hatred and destructive fantasies on persons whom he both loves and hates. In his fantasy, he damages those parts of the mother that withhold instant gratification – the voice or the breast; they are attacked or destroyed. I assume, along with Melanie Klein, that these fantasized attacks on the bad part aspects of the mother are split off and ejected. As Bion has shown, an empathetic mother can take in these elements projected into her, mentally “digest” them and return them to the baby in a loving way. Bion calls this model (1962) “container -contained”, since the mother takes in the baby’s primitive feelings and fears like a container. The baby feels himself, along with his dark feelings, held and understood by a strong and loving mother, and this strengthens his loving aspect. In this way, split aspects can be integrated, and the feeling of a totality comes into being, also including the grief and regret the baby feels for what he has done to his mother or father in its thoughts. But if the child has very strong aggressive impulses, they are more difficult to integrate: they stand their ground, threatening the baby’s emotional balance. These childlike aspects remain more or less vital in every human being, just as do the internalized, damaged maternal or paternal inner objects. Freud, Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal all believed that artists have a particularly lively access to the childlike part of their psyche, since they have preserved their childlike powers of observation and curiosity. Like a child, they can take in situations or impressions in a fresh and unprejudiced way and forge links to their inner world and inner objects. The wish to compensate for attacks the child carried out in his fantasy constitutes a power- ful drive to depict these themes in symbolic and artistic fashion. In art production, it becomes evident whether the working through and integration of early fears and wishes is achieved in a primitive or mature way. Even in relatively forceful works of art, libidinous powers take the upper hand over destructive powers, since new links are created during the production of art and something new is created – as with the internalized creative sexual parental couple (Bion 1957a). The particular reformation of an adolescent’s inner world will now be discussed using one film, Bad Taste, and two famous youth novels – Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh. All three works