Seite - 179 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits 179 (or were adopted) tend to become pregnant at the same age as their own mothers, thus perpetuating the pattern under which they have also suffered. The way an ado- lescent experiences his body depends on his state of mind. As Freud has shown, the mental factor plays a central role in psychosexuality. Patterns of observing one’s own body are conveyed through psychic experience. Repeating the (prob- lematic) pattern of unplanned pregnancy in the second generation, the body plays the central role of “acting out”. As already described, the earliest memories of our life live within us, determining our behavior, although both the baby -ego and adult components of an adolescent’s personality are active. An adolescent girl can incorporate these various parts of her personality into being a mother, projecting her neediness, vulnerability and cared -for status onto her baby and employing her maternal “component” in caring for her baby. When caring for her baby, she is mothering not only her real baby but also herself – her “inner baby”. This constellation already points to an enormous inner pressure that must be mastered in addition to the actual, outer difficulties that render a young mother truly “needy”. If teenagers have not yet finished their schooling, they must either manage both school and caring for their baby simultaneously, or risk the handi- cap to their future that dropping out of school would constitute. They must take responsibility for a small human being, something that is difficult even for an adult mother or father. Teenage relationships are often short -lived or turn on chance encounters: the young parents might have not yet truly gotten to know one another and built an emotional basis for their relationship. Economically, they cannot support themselves and their new family and thus require the shelter of their parents; paradoxically, this makes teenage parents temporarily not more but less independent at this stage of their lives. The facts are dramatic and deserve a brief exposition: according to a report from UNICEF (2015), 15 million teenagers became unintentionally pregnant (in 2015) – in Austria 12 out of 1000 teenagers and in Germany 16 out of 1000. In Europe, British adolescents lead the statistic, with 22 out of every 1000, but the USA has 55 pregnancies per 1000 adolescents. The lowest number is found in Holland – only 4 pregnancies per 1000 adolescents. It is hard to comprehend these statistics in light of the facts that reliable birth control (in the form of the Pill) has existed for more than 60 years, that sex education is widely prevalent both in European and US schools, and that advice is available from gynecologists and consultation centers. We can assume that there are strong unconscious motives for becoming unin- tentionally pregnant. Sexuality can serve various motives. Birksted -Breen writes that “Psychoanalytic developments also moved away from sexuality as that which needs to be uncovered, to sexuality as serving defensive purposes, used to avoid psychic pain and to deal with anxieties of a psychotic nature” Birksted -Breen 2016, 559). In adolescence, sexuality and pregnancy are active on the unconscious level in many ways. This undoubtedly varies with each individual case, but typical