Page - 58 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

58 Psychosexual development in puberty At other times, she made me into a doll who can only take small steps and has no ideas of her own. Then, she fed me and told me how good I was. Later, she threatened to give me away to a stranger. She showed me she felt herself an unwanted child and could accept my interpretation of this. Behind the façade of a stupid, cheerful little girl emerged her rage and hope that I could accompany her in her loneliness and desperation. She wanted to see if I would recognize the truth and discuss it with her. In countertransference, I was often overwhelmed with the feelings Elfi pro- jected onto me because she could not feel them: I was plagued with doubts as to whether I could truly help her, sometimes feeling I had completely failed as an analyst and had no right to ask for money to play games with a small child. Only when I wrote down my feelings of incompetence and doubt did it become clear to me that these were an exact description of Elfi’s own feelings. It is as if Elfi were forbidden to use her mind. She was intelligent enough to know she was different from other children, and this knowledge made her feel angry and helpless. She quickly exhibited considerable changes. She began to speak in complete sentences and stand up to her older brothers and wild children in her class. She stopped refusing to learn and tried to read and write as well as she could. After a year of analysis, she could convince her mother that she should come to our sessions alone after school, and was very proud of this: coming alone to me via public transportation gave her self -confidence. Only in her second year of analysis did it become dramatically evident that Elfi did not only have great emotional problems but also a subnormal intel- ligence. For her parents – but also for me – it was painful to recognize that I would not be able to bring Elfi to a satisfactory academic level by working through her fears, as I had with other children in analysis. I had wished not to see my handicap – not to recognize the limits in my patients and myself. I had to dismiss my ambitions of extraordinary results in my work as an analyst, and instead work with Elfi in a realistic framework. Would I be able to help her develop her modest capacities? Elfi often surprised me with her realistic assess- ment of her limitations. She was the only one in her family who could call prob- lems by their name. She once asked her father whether he still loved her mother, completely surprising him, since the two older sons did not trust themselves to pose this question. Elfi’s analysis during adolescence Very slowly and tentatively, signs of erotic and libidinous desires began to reveal themselves in Elfi. She viewed her bodily alterations such as breast and figure development positively, but viewed her first menstruation negatively. Her mother had treated it as a sickness, taking her to the doctor. In analysis, Elfi described it vaguely; she categorically denied my attempts to put her feelings about menstrua- tion into words. In the parental discussions, Elfi’s father was able to explore this issue, but the mother did not wish to talk about it.