Page - 111 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Development of feeling 111 Some years later, during Cleese’s sojourn in New Zealand, a loving woman affords him the possibility of having his first sexual experiences. He writes: And a few weeks later I was presented with the surprising offer of a chance to lose my virginity. . . . I met a girl – we’ll call her Ann – with whom I felt really relaxed and who thought me hilarious. She found my impersonation of a mouse the funniest thing she had ever seen. We enjoyed a couple of eve- nings of entirely lust -free meetings. . . . I received a phone call from Ann . . . she would be staying with me at the hotel. Ann and I had a few drinks, went upstairs, and she made it easy for me, bless her. I had no idea how to please her, but she seemed perfectly happy, and there was affection, and she only asked me to do my mouse impersonation twice. This took place in the Station Hotel, Auckland, midwinter, 1964 and I was nearly twenty -five years old. When I was in New Zealand in 2006, I met Ann again, and I was pleased and proud that such a lovely and kind woman had been my first love. Thank you Ann. (Cleese 2014, 166) Cleese’s imitation of the mouse seems to not only have been a funny scene, but presumably also an expression of his self -worth. It seems that Ann managed to ameliorate (in a maternal way) his great fear and afford him this good experience. Anderson describes one of his patients: For example, a young male patient told me that when he began to notice pubic hair on himself at puberty he was disgusted and horrified. For him, the presence of a sexual body confronted him with very disturbing phantasies of his parents, especially his father, arising out of his Oedipal relation to his parents, which had remained split -off and projected into his father’s sexual- ity. Puberty meant for him an enforced intrusion, a bodily invasion of his father’s body into his – a very concrete version of the more benign phantasy of becoming like his father. In his world there could be no such peaceful order: he was either a non -sexual little boy, or he had his parents’ hated sexu- ality forced into him in the form of his father’s sexual body. (Anderson 2009, 4) The threat he feels emanating from his sexual body in rooted in his early fantasies, of which he is unconscious. He hated his father’s sexual body, which took his beloved mother from him. Only when he later experienced a psychic breakdown as a boy were these deep unconscious layers revealed and worked through. 3.3 Impact on the parental psyche Their children’s adolescence also has strong effects on parents’ psyches, either furthering their emotional growth or causing them to “act out” in order to avoid psychic pain.