Page - 147 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 147 two umbrellas as a parachute; he landed in the hospital with two broken legs. Such stories elicited admiration – even a priest laughed at Franzi’s accident. Only 40 years later did the author wonder at such socially accepted forms of cruelty and delinquency. In each of us there is a “delinquent self”, expressing itself in direct form through tax evasion, stealing newspapers or books, and indirectly through schadenfreude and rubbernecking. The exercise of violence elicits contradictory reactions. The violent adolescent seems powerful, ruling over others and spreading fear, a fascinating figure for identification and emulation. The opposite pole is helplessness and fear in the face of violence – a regression to the early experience of the helpless baby, depend- ent on others for its survival. When others are the victims of violence, we feel either empathy or schadenfreude, which is the enjoyment of others’ misfortune, expressed either covertly or openly in mockery or (more subtly) in irony and sarcasm. In his macabre, grotesque picture books such as Max and Maurice (1865), Wil- helm Busch depicted such pranks to elicit schadenfreude in the reader. Max and Moritz strangle Widow Bolte’s chickens with a cord and proceed to fish them out of her frying pan. With taunts, they lure the tailor Bock over a wooden bridge they have previously sawn in two, over a brook into which he falls and almost drowns. They fill the village teacher Lämpel’s pipe with gunpowder, thus causing an explosion leading to severe burns. In his introduction, Busch (in the original German version) explicitly offers readers a chance to laugh at the boys’ pranks comfortably – since we will not be their victim (Busch 1865, 190). Busch then explicitly invites the reader to giggle with schadenfreude in enjoy- ment of these often sadistic and life -threatening pranks. The victim of the fourth prank is the good, reasonable teacher Lämpel, who plays the church organ on Sundays. Just as he gratefully lights his pipe in satisfaction, it explodes: “Ah!” he says, “no joy is found Like contentment on earth’s round!” (Busch 1902, 30) Wilhelm Busch cleverly prepares the reader for this bad deed by first milking their bitter attitude towards teachers. Then, he depicts the teacher as priggishly self -satisfied – an object for the boys’ envy, since adolescents envy adults for seemingly having everything, including a place in the world, a relationship, a profession, settled views on life’s important questions: all the things that for an adolescent are still inchoate. The boys take pleasure in unloading their envy in an explosion, their murderous fantasy fed by their own dissatisfaction and impotence: Fizz! Whiz! Bum! The pipe is burst, Almost shattered into dust. Coffee -pot and water -jug, Snuff -box, ink -stained, tumbler, mug,