Page - 129 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

One must be young in order to do great things. —Goethe to Eckermann, 11.03.1828 The central focus in adolescence is to find one’s place in the world, to discover who one is, which profession one will undertake and how one will live. As Ernst Bloch describes, “youth believes that it has wings and that all the right things are waiting for its sweeping entry” (Die Zeit, April 1 2015, 30). It is the time of departure, radical change, separation from the parents and a new beginning. The grandiosity of youth indicated by Bloch and Goethe is based on the grandiosity of early childhood, and it plays here just as crucial a role as the feeling of powerlessness and vulnerability. As Musil writes in his essay “Political Confessions of a Young Man”, youth is the time of pos- sibilities, rebellion and creativity. It is an important time where character is shaped, acquiring a coherent, stable form – so to speak, a restructuring of the personality. The adolescent simultaneously both wishes and fears to become an adult. Instead of embarking on a voyage of discovery, a quest for identity, as the heroes of adolescent literature do, Peter Pan remains in “never -never -land” as an eternal child. Many adolescents conceive a longing for their lost childhoods. The salient features of this challenging time are often only recognized in retro- spect. In her memoirs, Coudenhove -Kalergi writes: It is a kind of awakening that I experience as a twelve -year -old in that spring, a recognition of the world’s beauty, the possibilities it offers, the mission of adulthood. Is it a presentiment of what will come? . . . Something this beauti- ful, I tell myself, you will never, never see again. . . . To get to know Prague and gallivant through its streets is the dream of my childhood. Only in the last year before we were exiled did it become reality. . . . After school or in the afternoon, I walk through my favorite parts, with a friend or preferably alone. Through the seminary garden up to the Strahov monastery. The lilacs are blooming there in their luxurious umbellifer, and their fragrance accompanies 5 The search for the self – identity