Page - 158 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

158 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits plates inside. Shortly after I was released from the hospital, I had a lung attack (lung embolism) and was put back in the hospital. A week after I left the hospi- tal again, the same thing happened. Then I was in the lung clinic for 6 weeks. About 2 months ago, I had a fight with the police and hit my fist through a piece of glass, cutting all five tendons to the fingers and both arteries and nerves. The doctor said it’s a miracle that they could halfway save my hand, since it was almost out cold. I’m surprised I can write so well (it was my right hand). Now I’m not addicted anymore and I’m not taking methadone either here in Unit 1. I was in withdrawal: Baumgärtnerhöhe – Breitenfurterstrasse – Baumgärtnerhöhe, then therapy in Ybbs for almost three months. I did have a relapse, but I went right back to Ybbs. On May 13 I was admitted, but I was in the SMZ Ost with blood poisoning. . . . Now I’m in custody because of reckless endangerment and bodily injury and other stuff, nothing too crude. . . . The last time I was in prison . . . 12 months altogether for breaking and entering . . . in between that I was always a few months out of prison. When I was in, I got methadone, now I don’t need it anymore. But I just can’t find my way out (of prison) here, because if you want to keep in business, you have to deal and I can’t and won’t do that. I want to stay clean. Recently I was just running around without a goal and couldn’t find a footing and it was only a question of time whether I die or get arrested. I sort of provoked my own arrest, because it couldn’t go on that way. Now I have the peace to think about how it might go on instead. (Staudner -Moser 1997, 129ff ) This letter summarizes how B. wanders around without a home – actually, prison constitutes a kind of home for him. It is in prison that he is able to get off drugs, and its closed environment helps him to orient himself, as opposed to the “outside”, which is far more challenging. In his autobiography From the Orphan- age to the Prison (1972), Wolfgang Werner describes a similar life story. Out of 27 years, he only spent four “in freedom”, and he describes his loneliness, rage, hate, aggression and hopelessness eloquently in this “social report”. Actually, B. is more often victim than perpetrator when he is involved in violent incidents. After the letter just quoted, he once again drifted into the drug scene, alternating between prison and hospital. In 2015, he died in prison while serving a long sentence for manslaughter. He remained in contact with the social worker until his death; he described his relation to her was the closest attachment he ever had. B.’s letter affords insight into his vulnerable, self -destructive side. The lion image he chose affords him a kind of pseudo -strength; in life, he remains both perpetrator and victim, entangled in an orgy of violence and flight into drugs. Often cruelly beaten and punished as a child, he now perpetrates the same role by provoking fights and violent acts. Only after the social worker has accompanied B. for a considerable length of time does his trauma from his stays in various homes become evident: beatings, confinement, humiliation and sexual assault were everyday occurrences – and