Seite - 170 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

170 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits of the parent) – one that would afford him an inner space for good relationships and establishing the balance between love and destruction. Only when a baby has regularly had another person “contain” its unbearably aggressive/destructive impulses, envy and fears of death and dissolution – someone who takes these impulses up, allows herself to be emotionally moved, “digests” them emotion- ally and then reflects on them – can the baby internalize the transformation of raw impulses into verbalized feelings. Bion speaks of the “reverie”, and Win- nicott of the “primary maternity” that affords a child protection, acceptance and understanding. Indeed, Bion calls the fulfillment of this need for understanding of the child’s loving and destructive impulses “nutrition” for the psyche. Internal- izing this transformation of raw emotional elements into thoughts and feelings also constitutes the basis for self -reflection and understanding one’s own psy- chic conflicts. If this experience seldom or never occurs, the baby is flooded with nameless fear (Bion). Bürgin (2004) writes that this destructive impulse “requires a passage through the inner world of a significant other” (Bürgin 2004, 243). Oth- erwise, a child cannot integrate the two split experiential worlds of an idealized and bad, persecuting mother; the mother – and, by extension, the child’s view of the world – remains split into good and evil. The child (and later, the adolescent) cannot integrate her own loving and destructive qualities or observe the world in a mixture of frustrating and fulfilling aspects. The lack of such experiences of acceptance and being wanted can later damage the adolescent’s sense of orienta- tion and meaning of life. This lack of synthesis often leads to lesser or greater learning problems: con- centration is hindered by a constant sense of such deep inner threats. Emotional conflicts, hate and rage, loneliness and lack of orientation hinder a student’s ability to take in knowledge – in effect a secondary handicap, evident in both case studies previously described. Instead of dialogue with parents who provide warmth, security and appreciation, these problem families offer unreliability and unpredictability. Instead of the strength embodied in internalized images of lov- ing parents, deep despair and loneliness reigns in the adolescent’s inner world: when a mother refused to bring her wounded son to the hospital in order to protect her violent partner, only the teacher and school principal attended to the son’s wounds, and he consequently preferred going into a home than back to this disap- pointing family. His parents also failed to help him with his homework – perhaps they did not even notice if he attended school. The child understands their failure to pay attention as a lack of interest, with the message imparted that it doesn’t matter whether he studies. Such adolescents protect themselves from their painful feelings of not being accepted and understood, of burdening the mother or being denied and rejected by the father, by blocking emotional proximity. “If trauma has permanently over- whelmed the feeling of the self as an active agent, grave pathological effects result,” writes Bohleber (2004, 236, translation McQuade). The adolescent never feels completely involved in his actions, with some part of his self assigned the role of uninvolved observer in order to avoid disappointment, leading to an