Page - 105 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Development of feeling 105 friend was only slightly preferred. For the most part, parents are also considered to be confidants. When relationships to parents are seriously fraught with neglect, mistrust, abuse, physical violence and humiliation, the situation is different. Paradoxically, freeing oneself from love -hate relationships can prove more difficult, because parents and children are intertwined in a tortured, confining pattern. The child’s bitterness over lack of attention, the desire for revenge over inflicted humiliation or physical violence from parents who cannot be taken as an example leads him to reject them along with their way of life – but to unconsciously repeat the same pattern. Examples are legion from problem adolescents, including violence, teen- age pregnancy, self -mutilation, drug use and contemplated suicide. A good dem- onstration of this basic destructive attitude attendant upon a break with parents is the Nine Bohemian Commandments in Hans Jaeger’s Fra Kristiania -Bohemen (1885): 1 Thou shalt write thy own life. 2 Thou shalt sever thy family roots. 3 One cannot treat one’s parents badly enough. 4 Thou shalt not beat thy neighbors for fewer than five crowns. 5 Thou shalt hate and despise all peasants. 6 Thou shalt never wear cufflinks of celluloid. 7 Forget not to make a scandal at the theater. 8 Thou shalt never have regrets. 9 Thou shalt take thy life. These nine commandments derive from adolescent provocation, desperation and hopelessness packaged into the life of a bohemian – conceived against bourgeois society, the society of parents. Jaeger founded the Fra -Kristiania -Bohemian Soci- ety together with Edvard Munch. The accompanying book was banned and its author condemned to 60 days in prison. This became the object of stormy discus- sion among intellectuals, liberals, proponents of free expression and press, and representatives of the bourgeois parties, who saw in Jaeger’s pronouncements a blasphemy and offense against public morals. The struggle between youth and parents took place on the political level. In his autobiography, Jaeger describes his extremely strict and bigoted father, who sought not to understand his son but instead to break his will. Great loneliness in childhood, physical violence and ter- ror were the basis of this desperate, anarchistic revolt. Let me now give an example of adolescents’ turbulent quest for a partner, rec- ognition from the opposite sex and the attendant competition with friends. In her work The Adolescent Diary and its Function in the Mastering of Typical Adoles- cent Problems, Janette Erhard (1998) quotes from adolescent diary entries. By chance, both Jan’s and Lari’s diary entries are included for the same evening – a party where they kissed. In his diary, Jan (16 years and 4 months old) has already