Page - 98 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

98 Development of feeling hands the phone back to Sebastian. Sebastian tries it and achieves success. Satis- fied, he says: “You see, I can do it!” Sebastian is convinced that everything belongs to him; he knows better than his parents how these new devices function. In truth, a playful attitude of trial and error is an excellent way to investigate these new programs. At the same time, however, Sebastian wishes to demonstrate that “we are the new generation – the world belongs to us!” Sebastian wishes to show that he can work the phone better than both his mother and father. From the grandparents’ perspective, there hovers a melancholy recollection of the time when their children engaged in the same kind of struggles with them. Now the parents experience what it is like from the other side – what it feels like to be pushed out of the central position. According to psychoanalytic theory, the situation of the adolescent girl distanc- ing herself from the parents is more difficult than that of the adolescent boy: in her Oedipal phase, she needed to give up her first love object, the mother, and turn towards her father. Thus, girls and women experience more guilt feelings due to this previous “betrayal” of the mother, as Chasseguet -Smirgel (1974, 139) describes. In adolescence, she must then renounce the paternal love object she more or less won in her fantasy. In a mature development, the girl has accepted the other, sexual relationship between mother and father and identified with the mother. The girl consoles herself with the thought that she will later become an attractive woman who chooses a husband and has children with him. In her inner world, this new solution constitutes a turbulent time. On the one hand, the girl wishes to be seen by the most important man in her life, her father, as attrac- tive and a sexual goal, but on the other hand she wants to distance herself from him and attain recognition from boys her age. These contradictory feelings make this phase of development very difficult for everyone involved. A father’s often - observed jealousy of his daughter’s admirers is not only because he must give her up, but also because of her unconscious projections onto him: she does not truly wish to leave him to her mother. In every new phase of life, the Oedipal situation must be newly worked through and modified in order to integrate new elements (Britton 2014, 71). The special kind of Oedipal situation with attendant wishes, fantasies, fears and anger at exclusion is unique for every individual and shapes the basic pattern of the personality. When an Oedipal fixation develops (based on traumatic childhood events or defense mechanisms), it can lead to a regressive withdrawal from reality (Britton 2014, 77). In normal development, the current situation is enriched by the revival of earlier Oedipal situations, whereas in the case of a fixation it is instead replaced with a kind of stereotypic replay – repeated instead of modified. Adolescents also must cope with the psychic pain, confusion and conscious/ unconscious conflicts caused by changes in the body. Many behaviors serve towards dealing with inner problems, defending or protecting the self from feel- ings that are extremely confusing and deracinating. The motto is: better act than think, better to belong to groups or gangs than to risk independent thinking, better