Page - 148 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

148 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits Table, stove, and easy -chair, All are flying through the air In a lightning -powder -flash, With a most tremendous crash. When the smoke -loud lifts and clears, Lämpel on his back appears; God be praised! Still breathing there, Only somewhat worse for wear. Nose, hands, eyebrows (once like yours), Now are black as any Moor’s; Burned the last thin spear of hair, And his pate is wholly bare . . . Now that his old pipe is out, Shattered smashed, gone up the spout? (Ibid, 32) It is not difficult to see in this explosion the rapturous image of an anal explosion, as formulated in child humor during the anal phase. A five -year -old girl wrote: Oma and Opa Sat on the sofa. Opa shat The sofa went splat. (Titze 1995, 45, translation McQuade) Melanie Klein pointed out that children lend their bodily excrement enormous positive or negative powers. They can be fantasized as gifts to the parents or as destructive weapons. With Busch and his readers, the murderous impulse is ameliorated – the teacher survives (although his pipe does not). Archaic, early fantasies of bodily omnipo- tence are actualized. In the end, the death of the two boys is occasion for rejoicing by all their early victims. In puberty, the adolescent body undergoes a fundamental transformation that can be confusing: on the one hand, it is clearly advantageous to have an adult body, stronger and capable of creating life, sexually attractive; on the other hand, the child’s trusted body has altered without the adolescent’s control: there is no choice but to accept this transformation. Under this pressure, adolescents tend less to reflection than to action, to spontaneous unloading of tension. It is not easy for parents to decide when adolescent behavior constitutes a step towards independence, something they should support – or is antisocial, self - -endangering or criminal, something the adolescent should be protected from. There is a fine line between sensible controls and helpful encouragement. If par- ents can trust their child to discern the border himself, then this can enormously