Seite - 250 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

250 Lost by the wayside – overstepping limits Discussion After separating from his girlfriend, Donnie at first thinks he cannot live with- out her. The first romantic love is a reminder of the first loving pair – mother and baby – which unconsciously activates early memories of being stroked and loved: memories of (in psychoanalytical terms) the good, ideal breast that carries everything good in it and secures the baby’s survival, or of the absent breast – the unavailable mother; this polarization is operative as long as the baby has not internalized a whole object, i.e., a mother with her good and bad aspects. Since the unconscious is incapable of negation, the absent mother is experienced as a bad mother who leaves the baby alone and refuses to fulfill its momentary needs. Donnie also idealizes his girlfriend, with whom he wanted to spend the “rest of his life”. Here, there is no realistic image of Sandy, but probably only an idealized image. The transformation of love into hate and murderous rage is completely blocked. In his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud 1915, SE XIV), Freud showed how the ego splits itself after losing a love object – just as the baby did. Donnie’s hatred towards the loved person who left him is redirected towards this part of himself who is identified with the loved/hated person. Only when the per- son observes a part of himself as an object can he split it off and want to kill it. How close the first love is to the mother is shown by Donnie’s thoughts, who writes a farewell to his parents – and not to Sandy. He first enjoys the thought of how his parents and little sister will weep and grieve at his burial. Many conscious and unconscious insults and impositions from childhood are presumably revital- ized in this fantasy; Donnie wants to punish his parents by taking the dearest thing to them, namely his own life. Then, however, he recalls affectionate memories of his parents and sister, and his life forces gain the upper hand: he wishes to live, wants everything to be “ok” again. In Donnie’s fantasy of his own burial, we see a separation between body and the bodiless ego. The reality of death’s finality is denied, resulting in a “good surviving ego” plus an evil body – derived according to Campell (1999, 77) from the idea of a union with the evil, archaic mother. Suicidal behavior is often hidden behind so -called tests of courage that actu- ally are games with death. Here, Heuves describes a test of courage as a kind of Russian roulette: David is thirteen years old. He is under treatment due to episodes of depres- sion. In one session, he confesses to a game he has been playing with himself for a few weeks. He makes an appointment with himself for a certain day and time. Then, he goes to a four -lane, busy road near his school, counts to thir- teen with his eyes closed, and then crosses the street without looking. He calls this exercise “the mastering of fear”. He has done it three times, and the third time, a car was barely able to swerve around him with its brakes screeching. To his own surprise and with horror, he realized he had never thought that the exercise could really have a fatal outcome. (Heuves 2010, 122)