Page - 150 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

150 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits mother said he was no longer aggressive but instead sad and depressed, asking her: “Why did you bring me into this world anyway?” In our transferential relation- ship, his massive aggression and destructive rage demand that I set particularly clear borders. He established an intense positive transferential relationship, so that weekends and holiday interruptions in our therapy became a painful threat, and he therefore often had outbreaks of rage at Friday sessions, where he would destroy toys. And yet he was able to construct beautiful, highly creative necklaces, vari- ous kinds of spiderwebs and complex cable cars for me out of string in the therapy room. Anna Freud called the psychic mechanism of unconsciously inflicting on other persons what one has suffered oneself “identification with the aggressor” (A. Freud 1992, 85ff ). Malcolm alternated between trying to get my attention and appreciation and rage at being abandoned on the weekends and holidays. Meanings of aggression In psychoanalysis, there are two contradictory assumptions concerning the mean- ing of aggression in the psychic apparatus. The later Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and Wilfried Bion proceed from a notion of the human being marked by Eros (life instinct) and Thanatos (death instinct), with a continuum between destructivity and aggression existing in a mild form in every essential form of relationship – as a component of sexual activity and penetration, as oral, ingestive energy in the intake of food, in the creative force. Melanie Klein called aggres- sion as mixed with the thirst for knowledge “knowledge desire” – the wish to get inside and take control of a person, a body or a thing. Freud emphasized that in sexual union – involving penetration and taking possession of the sexual partner – an aggressive component is necessary. When aggression is inhibited, curiosity – the wish to take something in – is also inhibited. Bion defines psychic categories with L (Love), H (Hate) and K (Knowledge). Karl Kraus referred to the aspect of hate necessary to creativity when he wrote “Hate must be productive, otherwise we might as well love” (Presse, 4. Juni 1926, S1 Spectrum, translation McQuade). In opposition to this view, a concept of aggression as a reaction to insufficient love and care has been propagated above all by Erich Fromm, ego psychology and Anna Freud. Sociological data Approximately 150 years of research on delinquency and crime has shown that male adolescents and young adult males consistently commit the greatest share of crimes (see Figure 6.1). Male adolescents between 12 and 25 years of age are not only the most frequent groups at risk for acts of delinquency, but they are also often its victims (Eisner 2002). In Western cultures, this finding has been remarkably consistent over a period of more than 150 years. In gangs, criminality and violence are encouraged and admired, even seen as a status symbol, with pressure on all group members to participate.