Page - 87 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Development of feeling 87 to procreate; for females, the power to have a baby, to have breasts that produce milk, to have an attractive body that draws attention. These new possibilities may fascinate, but they are also linked to the baby’s early feeling of omnipotence in order to counter its feeling of helplessness. For a child, the primitive wish to pos- sess and control the object was only a fantasy; an adolescent would now be able to actually fulfill these fantasies. Thus, it becomes necessary to newly order and work through early forms of identity and development. The very physicality of the changes, their concreteness (the fact of male potency, the reality of real pregnancy and a real baby) is a reassurance to the more normal (neurotic) part of the personality, but for the more primitive parts of the self, these changes are the means of realizing primitive and often destructive phantasies. Intercourse is not a longed -for act of procreation (and pleasure), but the means of getting inside the other: at the benign end of the spectrum, to become totally cared for; and at the negative end, to overpower and destroy, all in the service of very infantile wishes. It is these concrete desires which cause disturbance in those who cannot contain them, and great anxiety about the fate of the object and the self in those adolescents who are coping but fear that they won’t. (Anderson 2009, 4) Anderson is describing a psychic organization in the adolescent where early defense mechanisms such as splitting and projective identification now (re)appear. The adolescent’s changes threaten to reactivate his early, primitive bonds to the primary object – bonds that were subsequently repressed and split off; these con- tingencies now strive towards the surface, into adolescent consciousness. To the adolescent, these unintegrated, powerful primitive wishes represent a threat. Their potential fulfillment would flood thought itself with arousal and aggression, a consequence which the adolescent perceives as a catastrophe. Powerful defense mechanisms come into play to keep these impulses unconscious – such as self- mutilation, drugs, anorexia, teenage pregnancy, etc. I will now provide two short examples, with a more detailed treatment following later. The psychoanalytic view helps us understand that such troubling behaviors serve to protect adoles- cents from even more threatening inner wishes. Dorothy, 15 Some time after her first relationship with a boy had ended, Dorothy began to cut herself severely. Since there was no immediate dramatic impetus for this, her parents were very worried. In therapy, Dorothy spoke of her early childhood, when her father had an affair with another woman, subsequently abandoning Dorothy and her mother. How- ever, he then put an end to this relationship, reconciled with his wife and returned to the family. Recently, Dorothy discovered and read her mother’s diary. In the