Page - 187 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 187 she now has her baby, who is completely helpless and dependent on her. Perhaps she wished to bind Markus more tightly to her through the baby. Well, with contraception and so forth that was pretty incompetent. We did get condoms, but when you’re high and so on you don’t think of something like that. And he always said it was a pleasure -killer, totally stupid really. He, who was older, he ought to really have taken a little bit of responsibility. That’s how you’re immature when you’re sixteen. You know you can get pregnant, but you aren’t really conscious of it, not really. . . . You think, I won’t get pregnant after all, it won’t happen to me, sort of like that. . . . Only when it happens do you think, what crap. (Pankratz 1997, 77) Babsi contends that she didn’t quite see the problems with contraception and pregnancy as relevant to her. Theoretically, she knew she could become pregnant, but could not put this knowledge into practice. In a kind of megalomania, she was convinced that it wouldn’t happen to her, that she was somehow different. Her neglect of contraception was also fueled by Markus’ rejection of condoms as “pleasure -killers”, and a muddied consciousness due to alcohol and drugs. Here, her difficult life situation becomes evident. Babsi’s life situation shortly before pregnancy Since her freshman year in high school, Babsi called attention to herself for provocative behavior. The teachers often sent her to the principal; after she was expelled from her first school, she also changed schools more than once. Babsi says she was a “Gruftie in the Scene for a long time – three or four years . . . and it’s no secret that I was a drug addict.” At school, she wore her hair in front of my face, I dressed in black, was pale and the teachers were always saying “for God’s sake”. And I drank a bottle of alcohol every morning and started acting pretty messed up already early in the day. Or I smoke grass in the morning and came to school totally stoned. Well, that wasn’t even so bad then, but it got pretty terrible later toward the end. I took heroin – only for a month. (Pankratz 1997, 67) In this interview excerpt, Babsi describes her provocative and self -damaging behavior in more detail. Using German slang for drugs, she stages a special situation vis -à -vis the interviewer: she becomes the expert, turning the tables so that the interviewer is meant to feel foolish and excluded. Babsi’s increas- ing drift into the drug scene – to the dangerous point of a potential heroin overdose – shows how strong her inner need to extinguish her inner impulses, thoughts and fears is – something that became less and less possible as time