Page - 192 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

192 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits excluded – an unconscious staging, a proof of how terrible she is. At the same time, there is also an urgent wish in her to be a baby herself and have a loving man at her side – as the father of her child. In fact she falls in love with Markus, the most attractive boy at school; he can pull her out of her swamp. I understand this to mean that there is in her an image of a loving mother who will allow her to have a loving, potent man. He can, in fact, “save” her. The idea of saving somebody originates from the Oedipal phase where the child is convinced her mother does not make the father truly happy and she, the daughter, would love him truly and save him. Or conversely, the son is his mother’s savior – now, Markus is saving Babsi. Babsi manages to emerge from her inner vortices and choose Markus (who has enough of his own problems) as a substitute for her father. She also manages to make her parents support her emotionally and financially. With Babsi, we also see how from two negative forces a mainly healing, con- structive solution can come about; Freud speaks of the flexibility of psychosexu- ality. Pregnancy and the healthy baby Babsi brings into the world stand for her positive, inner forces. She is someone who has a healthy, good body, a body that nurtures not a sick but a healthy, strong baby – and her assumption that she is mainly bad is thus thoroughly disproven. Only slowly can her constructive com- ponent prevail; during her pregnancy she continues to wear only black, not cheer- ful pink – most likely out of a fear of an envious mother/bad fairy who could take the baby from her. We do not know whether Babsi’s mother really wanted to have her (Babsi is considerably younger than her other siblings). Her older brothers had already moved out by the time Babsi was 12 and her problems began. Perhaps Babsi sensed her mother’s ambivalence or secret refusal to deal with a baby at this late date, when the siblings were already older. The mother’s behavior indi- cates a great emotional distance: she is unable to be glad when Babsi has her first menstruation. Did the mother feel forced into the role of the receding generation? Indeed, Babsi has made her mother into a grandmother. Her unintended/uncon- scious pregnancy is a partial solution that nevertheless creates new problems. Babsi has not yet finished her schooling and is more dependent on her parents than the other students. She has to go without many things other adolescents enjoy and take on an early responsibility. The chance that she can build a stable relation- ship with Markus is slight, as she indicates. Babsi would like to have gotten more attention and love from him during the pregnancy. Her intense relationship to Markus, who is an outsider, enlivens Babsi’s depend- ent and needy side; she hangs on him like a barnacle and is afraid to be separated from him. The pendulum swings in the other direction – from the wish for free- dom to the longing for closeness. Presumably, her love for her baby also contains the wish to have somebody who is completely dependent on her, from whom she need never part. But Babsi’s sense of reality is in any event strongly enough developed that she can perceive the needs of her actual baby, and in the main ful- fill them. Her unconscious aggressive impulses are manifested in her worries: she is afraid to make the bath water too hot and burn her baby. At the same time, she