Seite - 216 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

216 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits The beginning of the Oedipal conflict was so intolerable for Mark, when his mother suffered under the sudden departure of her father, that he presum- ably excluded his own and his parents’ sexuality. Mark’s experience of being excluded and his frustration must have been increased when his mother became pregnant with his sister, who took the space within his mother that he wanted to occupy. In addition to this, his sister was an attractive, easy baby who slept and ate well. Presumably, Mark did not take in an image of the loving parental pair, one who thought about him, into his inner world – that is why he found it intolerable that his analyst thought about him. Instead, the analyst became a dangerous unified Oedipal pair, and he felt excluded. These images originated in an earlier phase of Mark where he could not speak. If the parents cannot be aware of their child’s instinctive impulses and his projective identifications and are not firm within themselves, they cannot contain them. In Mark’s case, his mother seemed to have been filled with hatred and resentment of her father’s departure and the collapse of her nuclear family, and instead of being able to contain Mark’s projective iden- tifications, she rather projected her unresolved problems with her father into him. Selma Fraiberg (1980) calls this phenomenon of projected unresolved conflicts with the mother’s parents onto the baby, thus distorting the new baby’s percep- tions, “ghosts in the nursery”. Feldman demonstrated that the image of an inner, creative pair in the child can only develop when the earliest relationship between mother and baby is ade- quately stable. Since Mark wishes to penetrate into me in order to be completely one with me, he does not speak. In this way, he puts pressure on me to be com- pletely attentive, supporting his fantasy that it is not necessary to speak. In this way, the analyst embarks on a collusion – the understanding that she forms an intimate couple with the patient that excludes everyone else: This seems to be directly connected with the development of the patient’s capacity to allow thoughts and ideas to interact in a kind of healthy inter- course. On the other hand, the phantasy that any connection forms a bizarre or predominately destructive couple seems to result in a damaged, perverse or severely inhibited form of thinking. (Feldman 1998, 106) Negotiating the end of analysis The end of Mark’s analysis was as difficult as its beginning. Mark sent contradic- tory signals. In the outer world, he was successful: he passed the entrance exams to an excellent technical university. He had a friend with whom he went to discos, although his mother worried that this was too dangerous for a 16 -year -old and that he could be lured into drug abuse. Mark managed a part -time job at a computer store, earning enough to buy himself a computer. His job consisted in explaining new computer systems to customers, and his supervisor was very satisfied with