Page - 164 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

164 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits The other player sits comfortably at R.’s usual place, drinking a beer and talking to the waitress. R. enters. He looks around, noticing the new situa- tion, which noticeably irritates him. He comes up to S. with his arms crossed and says in a threatening tone: “Do you know you’re sitting at my place?” S. doesn’t listen to him, but instead continues talking. R. casts a pleading look at the trainers. He hadn’t reckoned with this kind of reaction. He doesn’t know what to do next. Then, he rolls up the sleeves of his sweater, leans on the table and asks again – this time with more emphasis. Now, S. hears him. He gives R. a friendly smile, saying that he hasn’t seen R.’s name anywhere on the chair, lifting it up to demonstrate that it isn’t written on there. R.’s facial expression darkens; he calls the waitress and tries to get her to say this is his place in the bar, and he won’t relinquish it to anyone else. But the waitress demurs, unwilling to enter the conflict, and simply takes their orders. S. is friendly, but will not give in, ordering a beer as the tension rises. R.’s posture expresses his tension and lack of tolerance for the situation – but suddenly his face changes and he calls out to the waitress: “For me a beer too. Both drinks on me!” He takes another stool and drinks a beer next to S. (Staudner -Moser 1997, 100ff ) During these two young men’s role -playing, a conspicuous escalation of their controversy is suddenly and surprisingly dissolved. R. is first startled to find S. sitting in his place at the bar, which annoys him. With his arms crossed – a confrontational signal – R. steps before S. and addresses him in a threatening voice, laying claim to “his” bar stool. S. ignores him, which causes R. to cast an imploring look at the trainers, who do not intervene. Now R. rolls up his sleeves as if preparing for a fistfight, and asks S. once again to vacate his place, this time with more emphasis, demanding his usual seat. Mocking R., S. takes his claim to a fixed “place” literally, lifting up the bar stool and thus ridiculing R. in front of the other customers, since clearly R.’s name cannot be written on the stool. With a glowering expres- sion, R. now turns to the authority of the waitress. When the waitress refuses to intervene and S. orders a beer, the situation is on the brink of explosion. Suddenly, R. realizes he could reinterpret the scene: he is now the host, who treats S. to a beer and thus can “invite” S. to sit at his bar stool. R. has newly defined the relationship and found a path from helplessness towards a shap- ing of the social situation. In the discussion afterwards, R. says that at the beginning he had not believed the situation could end so well. He became very quickly annoyed at first – S. was looking for that reaction – and felt like an idiot. It particularly infuriated him when S. lifted up the bar stool (here, the group confirmed that R.’s posture was threatening), and it took him quite a while to consider what to do next. He also took S.’s ordering of the beer as a provocation, since he seemed to be demonstrating his claim to R.’s place.