Seite - 45 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Psychosexual development in puberty 45 Tolerable – if I only masturbated once every six months. I punished myself for this by inflicting a wound in myself every time I committed this sin. Today, I can count on my legs how often I masturbated for one particular year. (Jahnn 1974, 12, translation McQuade) At the age of 16, Jahnn conducts this – as he calls it – “life and death strug- gle”, emerging as the winner. Over time, Jahnn wounds himself, turning his sexual tension into self -aggression in order to punish himself. But the entire time he struggles against these temptations to cut himself and suffers, he is preoccupied with fantasies of harming himself. It is difficult to say how con- fused this inner struggle made him, since he also writes of the “appearance of Christ on the cross on the wall”, apparently exhibiting signs of religious delusions. Nevertheless, adolescence is a time of revolt – even if we can discuss whether an adolescent’s behavior is normal or exhibits signs of a present or future pathol- ogy. Every individual must experience his own adolescence. Moses Laufer, who with his wife Eglé Laufer established the Brent Adolescent Center in London, sums up his long experiences in the following sentence: There is only one cure for adolescence and that is the passage of time and the passing of the adolescent into the adult state. (Laufer 1995b, 4) Another way to psychically work through early childhood and adolescent wishes is artistic activity such as films or novels. From a huge range of examples, I will here examine and interpret one cult film and two novels. 2.5 Working through themes from early childhood and puberty in art In his essay “Creative Writers and Day -Dreaming” (1908a), Freud pointed to the similarities between daydreams and the creative work of a writer. Already in childhood games, the child creates a fantasy world where the child takes on various roles, also playing out and satisfying her wish to be an adult. In a similar way, the writer creates people in “plays” who interact with each other. “Actors” embody these interactions in the theater or in film. In novels and short stories, heroes are created with whom the reader can identify, living successfully through adventures and being saved in fantastical ways. In spite of great dangers, the reader retains the feeling of safety for the hero, since the novel would end with his death. “It seems to me, however, that through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day dream and of every story” (1908a, 149). Freud quotes the comfort- ing “Nothing can happen to me!” of the Austrian playwright Anzengruber, since the hero is always saved. The difference between daydreams and poetic works