Seite - 68 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

68 Psychosexual development in puberty Elfi: My development has nothing to do with here, it’s just my development. (She says this without conviction.) Analyst: You are torn between your father’s opinion that analysis helps you and your mother’s opinion that it doesn’t. Elfi (very clearly): Yes, that’s true! Analyst: You are glad that your sessions here are not yet over. Even when it is painful, we can look the painful truth together in the face. When Elfi leaves, she looks at me thankfully. Discussion In this session, it was very moving to gain insight into two central topics in place of the denial and defense I so often encountered. One topic is her secret thought – her knowledge – that she is deeply rejected by her mother, who only decided to have Elfi because of religious scruples. This rejection is particularly burdensome for the child, since it was never clearly formulated and nevertheless determines her life. Any child can stand a painful truth when it is possible to talk about it; try- ing to prettify it doubles the emotional burden. The second topic is experiencing together the desperation that is projected onto the analyst. When suppressed or secret aggressions can be revived and interpreted in transference, there is a basis for hope. In transference, the analyst must be able to psychically bear the feeling of rejection, to “emotionally digest” it and then put it into words. In this way, the patient experiences how a projection of psychic pain can be transformed into understanding, which then can be reintrojected into the child as his own feeling. Through this process of transformation, grief can be felt together. Emphatic rejec- tion and the state of being unwanted are projected onto me – I feel the massive rejection under which she suffers her whole life and which oppresses her. Being able to bear this painful feeling and reflecting on it made it possible to detoxify it and return it as a thought, so that she can also reflect on it. The point is to show Elfi – through her experience with me – that it is possible to feel rejected at the moment. She can then take her projections back and see them as belonging to her. She is surprised and shocked that I can speak about her problems and her secret wishes. Then her fear becomes evident – the fear that she (like her mother) can never go out and lead her own life. She longs for love and for a real boy. Will I allow her to have a boyfriend? Does she have the confidence for one? I suggest that she switch from the child therapy room to the room for adults. Elfi agrees immediately and can hardly wait. She wishes to bring only a few of her materials – only the pad of paper and colored pens. She examines the new room. When I interpret that she wants to leave her childhood behind and become an adult, she says, the best thing is being an adolescent: Elfi: It’s boring being a child, when you’re grownup you have to work and slave away and take care of kids. A teenager can go to parties. (Pause) When you earn money yourself, you can get your wishes. I want to buy a dog.