Page - 131 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

The search for the self – identity 131 instead of thinking. Earlier feelings and modes of behavior are stirred up. Like the child who has just learned how to walk and walks away from its mother briefly to investigate the world before returning to his secure maternal home base, the ado- lescent dares to investigate an adventurous new realm before returning to the lap of the family. The search for identity tends to occur at this age in an experimental fashion, more through action than through reflection. The focus is on investigating an unknown future. For children who grow up in difficult family situations, this time can constitute a liberation. The girl who was seen as lazy and uninterested, awkward and difficult, can bloom through the admiration of her peers, seeing herself as an ugly duckling who is finally recognized as a swan. We therefore speak of adolescence as a “second chance” for attaining a different social posi- tion in a new context, thus affording an inner restructuring of self -esteem; this is why new systems of contact such as peer groups have a central significance as a field for experimentation – “experimentation” that, fraught with irritation, shame, guilt feelings and stress, lies partly within the realm of the normal and partly out- side. Adolescents often do not know why they do something, do not know why they feel as they do and then feel still worse since they do not know “why”. To the question of “What got into you for you to do that?”, they then often answer: “I don’t know, I just had to do it.” Bion appraises the adolescent situation by describing the phenomenon of emotional turbulence as a part of “growth”. He writes: “Turbulence is what is manifested when an apparently co -operative, quiet, docile and admirable child becomes noisy, difficult and rebellious” (Bion in Bleandonu 1990, 242). Adoles- cence is a stage where turbulence is normal and can be expected. As in the analytic process, adolescents evolve in spirals. As Bion writes about the analytic process: “We repeatedly return to the same point, but on different levels of the spiral” (Bion 1979, 85). 5.1 The development of character Psychoanalysis deals with adolescent character development in this turbulent time via several concepts, since it touches almost every area of the psyche and environ- ment. But we all recognize that an adolescent ending puberty will have developed a clear mode of dealing with his own life questions. His behavior, his attitudes, interests and relationships have become more predictable, exhibit greater stabil- ity and tend to remain consistent under pressure. The basic patterns of the per- sonality (as explained earlier) were already set in the early years of life and are still relevant. Basic experiences of being lovingly held, emotional accessibility of parents, their capacity for taking in the child’s projections and digesting them emotionally (containing), form a secure basis for the child’s inner world with good inner objects. If the child did not adequately experience these foundations of trust and secu- rity, then his basis becomes shaky and it becomes difficult or impossible for him to integrate contradictory claims between his inner world and the environment.