Page - 115 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Development of feeling 115 driving) that I wanted to use their car to see friends the next morning, and she agreed. My father intervened to say that she had promised our neighbor to use the car at that time. My mother replied: “But then I hadn’t known that Stanley would be here.” I believe I can still reasonably approximate the rhetoric of his responding moral satire: “Oh, I see, Stanley is here. Therefore all obliga- tions, all friendships, all right and wrong are to be suspended for the duration. Stanley is here. If only the reasonable request had been for any other time than just this time, then you would keep your promise. Too bad for the world and its needs. Yet the world must understand that Stanley is here! But if I am alive tomorrow morning that promise will be kept”. (Cavell 2010) The fact that Cavell (over 70 at the time he wrote this) can quote his father almost verbatim in a scene from 50 years ago demonstrates its enormous significance to him. Although Cavell is writing of his father’s anger at him, we might detect the author’s triumph at managing to provoke his father via preferential treatment by his mother. He had just graduated with honors from Harvard, whereas his father had not been able to attend college. In the autobiography, Cavell describes his advantaged position with a mix of satisfaction and shame – as well as sorrow at his tense relationship with his father. In any case, it is painful for parents to be demoted from the position of their child’s premier love object. Instead of the father being his daughter’s most important man, the new boyfriend is praised effusively. Fathers tend to be jeal- ous and critical of their daughters’ boyfriends – no boyfriend is good enough; or they set overly strict rules, in unconscious envy of the daughter’s budding sexu- ality. That being said, it is very difficult to negotiate a curfew system (when the child is required to be home) that is both adequately structured and adequately flexible. If a father is not aware of his contradictory feelings, he might start behaving like an adolescent himself, embarking on an amorous relationship to a younger woman – perhaps one his daughter’s age. In general, fathers are bet- ter advised to tolerate their often stormy arguments with their daughters. Lucy reports that she often has loud quarrels with her father and storms out of the room, but then she returns and apologizes, whereupon her father says everything is okay; it is good that she trusts him enough to voice her opinion and contradict him. With her friends, Lucy says, she is on the submissive side and does what they want of her. Adolescents are striking out on new paths, an undertaking often accompanied by insecurity and fear. This is why their behavior is often so erratic. They take dogmatic positions not because they are sure of themselves but because they wish to test their opinions against their parents’ resistance. Parents often do not notice that their adolescent child is covertly paying close attention to their arguments even while vehemently (and sometimes unfairly) protesting them: he might dis- miss a parental warning in the heat of an altercation, only to later observe it with- out further commentary.