Seite - 30 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

30 Psychosexual development in puberty opportunity to avoid lifelong character deformation: manifestations of adult psy- chotic illness in the adolescent “were showing signs of what might be considered in the adult to be psychotic but instead were signs of a temporary, although severe, break with reality rather than the presence of an established and irreversible psy- chotic illness” (Laufer and Laufer 1997, XII). Therapeutic help at this stage can help the adolescent to once again launch the developmental process which had collapsed due to his excessive fear. Early experiences influencing the deepest layers of the personality are the most difficult to decipher, since they involve archaic organizational forms of the psy- che. The ability to experience oneself as a person separate from the mother and to see different parts of the mother as belonging to the same person lays the basis for an integration of part aspects and a relatively secure relationship to reality. Another important developmental step is the solution of the Oedipal conflict. 2.2 Flaming up of Oedipal desires The Oedipal situation is a particularly significant crystallizing point for child development, and how the child masters it will structure his thinking and feel- ing fundamentally. In its central meaning, one can compare the Oedipal situation with the Copernican revolution. The Copernican departure from a notion that the earth is the midpoint of the universe (geocentric image of the world), along with acknowledgment that the earth moves around the sun (heliocentric image of the world) entails a change in the position of the human being as observer of the world. The earth and thus the human being are no longer the midpoint of the world, but instead part of a larger system (Kuhn 1957). Similarly, the child’s egocentric view of the world is altered by the increasingly powerful reality principle – that not the child, but instead his parents, a sexually active pair, embody the family’s center. In his fantasy, the child experienced himself as the world’s center, loved and cared for by his mother and father. In his fantasies of omnipotence, he saw himself as ruler of the world, at the center of attention: “his majesty the baby”. Through his powerful cries, he has the capacity to call his parents, and through his smiles and progress in growth, he elicits their praise. Or, alternatively, he experiences him- self as powerless, at the mercy of the world, furious, full of mortal fear. The baby attempts to expel these threatening feelings in order to retain his idealized view of the world. Freud calls the Oedipal complex the “nucleus of neurosis”. The child’s actual experience that her omnipotent desires are partially fulfilled through love and succor, however, also constitutes an important base for the devel- opment of her personality, self -worth and thinking. Melanie Klein emphasizes the significance of real, positive environmental conditions for the child, loving care on the part of its mother and father (Klein 1940, 20). Behind the omnipo- tent baby’s image of the ideal world, there lurks the opposite specter of utter powerlessness in an inimical world where it has no chance to survive. The swift shift from the small child’s feeling of omnipotence to powerlessness constitutes a major challenge for its parents.