Page - 249 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 249 Into one’s own meat But feels Nothing. No blood sprays. One sees A long cut And thinks: I don’t want To die. (Peter Turrini, “In the Name of Love” (2005), Poems, 91. Copyright Suhrkamp Verlag, translation McQuade) How can the question of why a healthy young human being intentionally ends her life be answered from a psychoanalytic point of view? As opposed to a sociological perspective, which attempts to establish societal and economic reasons for suicide, psychoanalysis turns its attention to conflicts within the adolescent’s inner world. What is occurring in the adolescent’s psyche that can evoke thoughts of suicide, following him like a compulsion and finally causing him to make concrete plans? What occurs on the emotional level between the planning and the carrying out of a suicide? Will the suicide attempt be carried out “unsuccessfully”, in order for some- body to save the attempter? Which inner forces are competing with each other? Freud addressed the question of why adolescents so often submit to the death wish just at the time when they are undergoing a reawakening of drives, sexual curiosity and massive desires to satisfy the (opposite) life force. In his examina- tion of melancholy and sadism, Freud discerned a struggle between two oppo- site drives. A strong inner force, a destructive component of the superego, “often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change round into mania” (Freud 1932, 53). How does this cruel superego “work”? Freud speaks of a sadistic, extremely rigid superego that expresses itself as guilt feelings – or more often as criticism – and “extraordinary harshness and severity” (Ibid). Melanie Klein (1928) detected a connection between this archaic superego and the early stages of the Oedipus complex, where the child experiences its parents not as two separate people, but as a single dangerous, threatening “monster”. Freud understood the competition between life and death wishes as taking place in suicidal fantasies. Here is an example of a male adolescent, Donnie, 16 years old: When Sandy told me she wanted to break up, I thought there was no point in going on. I loved her so much. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. So I started thinking about killing myself. I imagined how I could do it and what kind of note I’d leave my parents. Then I started thinking about my par- ents and my little sister, and I thought of them at the funeral crying and being so sad, and I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I realized I didn’t really want to die; I just wanted everything to be okay again. (quoted in Bell 1998, 176)