Page - 263 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Epilogue 263 begin breast -feeding in a quiet, dark room, for instance. It is important that parents recognize the particular personality of their baby. How well parents cope with their baby’s temperament depends on their own personalities. Case studies show how divergent the development of children from the same parents can be. Sometimes, the same burdensome family situation causes one child to become a dropout from society, another to become a criminal, and another to become a good citizen. Every child takes up consciously and unconsciously dif- ferent aspects from the same family, as one famous analyst (an expert on schizo- phrenia) described her own family (Parker 1972a, 1972b). She describes herself as a problem child who grew up in a problem family and “by slow and painful steps, became a woman, a doctor, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst” (Parker 1987, IX). Of three children, one of them became a schizophrenic and killed him- self, her sister fell into depression and became an alcoholic, and the author went to medical school and studied psychoanalysis. She turned her attention to her beloved brother’s illness. In her book My Language is Me (Parker 1975), she describes the analysis of a schizophrenic adolescent who developed his own lan- guage that enabled him to withdraw into his private, psychotic world in the face of upsetting and deracinating feelings and events. She describes the special kind of communicative dysfunction in families where one family member exhibits schizophrenic reactions. In the last 30 years, psychiatrists have systematically addressed the problem of why different people master the same traumatic experiences, disadvantageous family constellations, deprivation and psychic and sexual abuse. Under the rubric “resilience”, researchers have attempted to find out why some people deal with protracted stress, poverty and duress better than other people who are exposed to the same disadvantages. Resilience is understood as an “interactive phenomenon”, with factors both of nurture and risk examined for how they affect this capacity. “The most powerful influence on our capacity to manage life’s hurdles is the qual- ity of care we received in childhood, especially the earliest years,” writes Kraemer (1999, 273). This entails the capability of reacting flexibly and elastically to dif- ficulties, with the courage and self -confidence to master them. The greatest risk is posed by early neglect and physical or psychic attacks, marital problems and permanent conflicts between parents. In academic studies, risk factors have been closely examined as to whether children of divorced parents or adopted children have less resilience than other children. Burdensome familiar conflicts are often handed down through the generations, as described by Fraiberg as “ghosts in the nursery” or by Byng -Hall (1995) as “family scripts” that can only be revised with difficulty. The unconscious handing down of these fraught modes of behavior often subverts a parent’s conscious wish to do things differently with his/her own children. The experiences children have in mastering minor difficulties, learning to deal with frustration and short separations, are seen as positive factors towards developing resilience. One example from research is that children who regularly have experienced happy separations from their parents – sleeping over at their grandparents’ or friends’ – can later master far better complicated experiences