Page - 130 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

130 The search for the self – identity me the entire way. On top of the Laurenz hill. Over the big staircase to the Hradschin. (Coudenhove -Kalergi, translation McQuade 2013, 32ff ) Coudenhove -Kalergi seems to see the world and herself for the first time. Like the lilacs, her adolescent soul and body are awakening, in a mood fraught both with innovation and melancholy (“something like this, I tell myself, you will never, never see again”). She feels a sense of possibilities, not yet limited by disappoint- ments, setbacks, guilt feelings and self -doubts. This makes for a major awakening on all levels – physical, emotional, spiritual and moral. Puberty is a time of breakout and of loss – sometimes both simultaneously. The process of integrating divergent tendencies is always turbulent, especially when they break apart and the adolescent suffers a psychic breakdown or chooses self - destructive, anomalous behavior. Flasar describes puberty as a crisis or collapse leading to a total withdrawal: I believe that growing up constitutes a loss. We think we are winning some- thing. In truth, we lose ourselves. I grieved for the child that I had been and that I – in rare moments – still heard beating wildly inside my heart. At the age of thirteen, it was already too late. At fourteen. At fifteen. I hated my face in the mirror, its sproutings and execrecenses. The scars on my hand all come from the attempt to make things right again. Countless shattered mirrors. I didn’t want to be a man who believed he was winning. Not to grow into any suit. Not to be any father who would say to his son: “We all have to function”. . . . This sentence was my guiding principle – a motto inscribed upon me. (Flasar 2014, 23ff, translation McQuade) Here, the process of becoming an adult is experienced only as threat and loss. When the adolescent observes his altered body in the mirror, it causes such pain that he turns away from or shatters the mirror – an expression of deepest despera- tion, rage and powerlessness leading to violence. Envy of his successful father leads this adolescent into a state of refusal. Instead of going out into the world, he opts for total withdrawal. This person becomes a “hikikomori”, the Japanese word for people who refuse to leave their parents’ house, shut themselves up in their rooms and reduce their contact to the family to a minimum. Some of them spend up to 15 years or even longer locked into this condition: in Japan, the number is estimated at 100,000 to 320,000 (Flasar 2014, 139). The title of this chapter may be misleading, since the concept of “self -seeking” implies a conscious search, a thought process. This is not the case. The question “who am I?” results from the loss of the unquestioned belonging to a family that the adolescent renounces in the process of becoming an adult. Accordingly, the adolescent prefers to avoid experiencing all the painful feelings associated with this loss. Instead of thinking, the adolescent tries out various modes of behav- ior, presentations of the body, membership in groups. The motto could be acting