Page - 104 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

104 Development of feeling before that I drank alcohol and that’s why I can’t hold it at all. In retrospect I feel pretty embarrassed that I can’t remember anything. Everyone is talking about it at school, because I did such stupid things. I acted up, was making out with two boys – my boyfriend Sven and also his best friend. “At first, Sven’s friend kissed me and I thought it was Sven. Only when a friend of mine advised me I ought to stop and when Sven yelled at me did I notice that it wasn’t Sven. When Sven got angry and said he never wanted to see me again, I slapped him. But he found that sexy, and told me so. I yelled at him that he shouldn’t be so jealous and furious with me. He’s not in love and we’re only friends. I said: ‘Do you want something from me?’ He said ‘No’. She slapped him. He kissed her for five minutes and we made up.” Lucy accepted the invitation to two cocktails that she didn’t really like, but drank out of politeness. Then, giving herself up to the experience of alcohol, she danced wildly, laughed and became ecstatic. Everything became jumbled together – the music, the closeness of the dancers, her ecstatic mood: she can hardly remember now. Although this scene embarrasses her, she also finds it bril- liant. Lucy expresses this syntactically by narrating the “climax” of jealousy in the third person (“she slapped him”). But the other spectators also observed the scene and talked about her shocking behavior for days afterwards. Lucy’s parents show understanding for her inexperience of alcohol. Accord- ingly, they change strategies and allow her to drink a half a glass of sparkling wine at parties. Neither her father nor her mother criticizes her, since she has learned her lesson from the party anyway. Through an experience like this, Lucy can take the step away from parental authority to self -discipline, but her parents’ strict prohibition of alcohol was also important for her development. Mark Twain perspicaciously describes the son’s altered relationship to his par- ents after the hyper -critical phase of adolescence: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty -one I was astonished by how much he had learned in the past seven years! (Twain 2015) Mark Twain’s remark is so perceptive because of the projective factor: not he, but his father has learned so much; Twain lives with massive projections, but can laugh at them with self -irony. The examples mentioned earlier are from parent -child relationships that Win- nicott would call “good enough”. On the solid ground of a loving relationship, adolescents go to painful lengths in order to distance themselves from their par- ents because they know that their parents do love them and that they love and trust their parents. To the question of what adolescents do when they encounter a major problem, 19% said they always spoke with their parents, 42% said they often did, 33% said sometimes and 6% said never (Albert et al. 2010). Speaking with a