Page - 56 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

56 Psychosexual development in puberty The emphasis here is on the patients’ own interest in their inner worlds and their taking responsibility for their own lives. The goal is to encourage them in discovering their own capacity for mastering life’s difficulties – the privilege and burden of adolescence – rather than remaining passive victims of this phase of development and of their environment. Freud contended that every psychological disorder finds its correspondence in the patient’s psychosexuality. In analytic work with children, such psychosexual disorders are often hidden behind acute problems. Using two case studies, I will show how the various levels of the inner world can be rendered transparent and can be worked through. Case study: Elfi Elfi was eight years old when she came to me for analysis due to her severe emotional and learning problems. At first it was not clear whether her learning problems were caused by her emotional problems or whether she had a subnormal intelligence. She attended private school where she was the worst student, and she was initially mocked and teased as an outsider. She could not read, inventing sim- ple stories and words instead of reading the actual letters. She was also unable to speak in complete sentences, often confused the words for he, she and it, seldom spoke and was very fearful. Family background Elfi was the youngest child in her family and had two older brothers; she lived with her father, a successful businessman, and her mother, who employed an au-pair girl in a large house with a garden. Behind the façade of a well -rounded family, the marriage had collapsed already several years before. The mother had emotionally withdrawn from the father, and became pregnant with Elfi due to an unplanned sexual intercourse – after this, they never had sex again; they merely lived in the same house together. However, the mother kept up this façade; the two sons took turns sleeping with their father in the marital bed, with the mother sleeping either in that son’s bed, or in Elfi’s room on a floor mattress. The father was very attentive to all three of his children. The mother emphasized to me that he was an excellent father. When the father had met the mother, she had been a fearful aristocratic 18 -year -old who had hardly come to terms with real life. Her own mother had died when she was 10, and she had a tense relationship with her stepmother. She and her brother were attended to by various nannies. Elfi’s father had taken a quasi -paternal interest in his wife before they had children, and encouraged her from the very beginning. I will here summarize Elfi’s development in analysis up until adolescence; her analysis took place three times a week.2 Elfi was very fearful, not confident enough at first to even touch the toys I had offered her – she always wanted me to tell her what to do (which I did not).