Seite - 248 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

248 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits Hughes describes the shock he felt at age 13 when a classmate took his life: I remember (MH) a boy at my school, Martin, who hanged himself early one Saturday morning. I think we were about 13. The story going around school first thing on Monday morning was that he had been caught shoplifting and that the police were going to call round to talk to his mother. He had ridden his bike to the Duke’s Drive (part of our school cross -country running route). . . . He threw a rope over a branch of one of the trees that lined the drive, leaned his bike against the tree, balanced on the cross bar and saddle then kicked the bike away. There was a hushed and shocked reverence to the whispered conversa- tions in the playground and on our way into school assembly; the head teacher John Scott, took the opportunity for a moving tribute, a minute of silence and a warning that there was no problem that couldn’t be faced up to. By the end of the day some boys were re -enacting what we thought had happened right from the shoplifting through the final awful seconds for Martin, alone and miserable in a cold dawn. Perhaps those play actors were coming to terms in some way with the enormity of what had now become a personal experience for us all. Even now, when I meet old school friends from 50 -plus years ago we still talk about Martin and why he “did it”. What effect did it have on us? (Arnett and Hughes 2012, 477) The children managed to work through this shock by replaying the terrible hours between the shoplifting and Martin’s suicide. In play, they identified with Mar- tin, attempting to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. Children sponta- neously develop healing powers through their games, then employing these to master their experiences. A shock can be better mentally “processed” through identification. None of the students attempted suicide. This terrible experience was instructive for the others – an experience that the principal used to give the students confidence that every problem can be solved when one deals with it. One important point made in the WHO study “Preventing Suicide” could be applied to Martin’s case. For him, the pressure he felt after his mother informed the police became unbearable, and he took his own life as a way of escaping this situation. Accordingly, WHO recommends any punitive measures immediately after an adolescent misdeed; this minimizes his lurking fear of the consequences and the attendant pressure towards suicide. Psychoanalytical understanding of psychic motives for suicide Peter Turrini has attempted to show the contradictory inner forces for and against suicide: A suicide Is something remarkable. One plunges