Boy Crazy

Remembering Adolescence, Therapies and Dreams

Janet Sayers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415190855
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724841
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In answering these questions, Janet Sayers highlights the revolution wrought in both sexes' psychology by adolescence, particularly by its fantasies of divided selves and loves and of 'boy crazy' grandiosity and romance.
Illustrated throughout with fascinating examples from a groundbreaking study of adolescent memories and dreams, Boy Crazy presents an engaging account of this little-researched period of human development. Sayers also draws on her own work as a therapist, and weaves in vignettes from fiction and film, to demonstrate the significance we attach in adulthood to our experiences as adolescents. She suggests that men and women respond differently to the sexual awakening that takes place during their teens, and to their own memories of that part of their life. In relating the findings of her research the author also explores to what extent the theories of Freud, Jung and feminism shape our understanding of the formative effect of adolescent experiences and emotions.
Boy Crazy provides a fascinating insight into the repercussions of adolescence on our adult lives and loves and will appeal to the general and specialist reader alike.

Part I

Introduction

1 Remembering adolescence

Some years ago I was invited to talk about adolescence with a distinguished feminist academic, Carol Gilligan, at a conference in Cambridge. I was delighted to be asked, not least because I was personally very involved in adolescence at the time. My sons were teenagers and this had led me to musing about my own teens. I therefore readily accepted the invitation.

When I came to think about what I would say I found the phrase ‘boy crazy’ occurring to me. Perhaps I was thinking of my own teenage boy craziness. Perhaps the phrase occurred to me because of research I was then doing into men’s and women’s fantasies about men and masculinity. Whatever the reason, I was appalled to find that in the subjects I know best – feminism and psychoanalysis – there was almost nothing written about adolescence. What then could I talk about? What could I say?

Most of all I was appalled because I knew from my own experience, and from that of my relatives, friends, students, and those I work with as a therapist, that adolescence is often crucial to making us what we are as adults. I learnt much the same from scattered references to adolescence in Freud’s writings. I therefore decided, after the conference was over, to pursue the subject further.

Since Freud’s followers had written next to nothing about adolescence, I decided to put what little they had written together with other relevant findings and theories. True to my Freudian roots, I also collected memories and dreams. This book is the result. At the end of this chapter I will introduce what I found. This included discovering that the phrase ‘boy crazy’, with which I began, was not fortuitous. It turned out to encapsulate particularly well what is often most central to the transformation brought about in men, as well as women, by adolescence. Before explaining this transformation further, however, and before saying something by way of introduction to Freud and to today’s widespread forgetting of adolescence that my book seeks to redress, I will begin with those who, by contrast, do remember the transformation wrought by adolescence and by their teens in their subsequent adult lives and loves.

Remembered teens

Examples abound. Again and again, in their autobiographies, writers dwell on pre-teen and teenage incidents making them what they are as adults. So too do media celebrities. An example is the British pop star, Jarvis Cocker. He tells a reporter of his teenage metamorphosis from an ugly duckling into a nascent star. He describes himself, aged 12, as a Lederhosen-clad ‘swotty, speccy, beanpole and the only boy in class to have long hair cripplingly shy and utterly introspective … with intensive guitar practice supplementing daydreaming in the school dinner queue’.¹

He goes on to describe the transformation of his life when, aged 17, he and his band, Arabiscus Pulp, won themselves a John Peel recording session. And that,’ says Cocker, ‘was it.’

In another article, Sarah, the Duchess of York, attributes the origin of her notorious status as binge-spending, self-bribing, estranged, and betrayed wife of Prince Andrew to her mother bribing, betraying, and abandoning her in her early teens. An interviewer writes:

When she [Sarah] was 14, her mother announced that she was leaving to live with the Argentinian polo player, Hector Barantes … Mum was literally here one day and gone the next. She offered a feeble bribe as ‘consolation’: a new bedroom, which she would especially decorate herself before departure. ‘So you don’t mind?’ Mum asked me. ‘No, no. It’s perfect. That’s great.’ The teenager was doing her best to say what she hoped the adult wanted to hear. This incident, she believes, sowed the seeds of much subsequent sad, ‘trying-to-please’ behaviour.… A year later, her mother and the polo devotee were married. ‘And that,’ Sarah recalls, ‘was that.’²

Others remember the formative impact of adolescence in their novels. It is a major theme in perhaps the longest ever autobiographical novel, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In it Proust’s narrator dwells at length on the forces impelling the obliteration of his dreams and memories of childhood by the sexual awakening of his teens. He also muses on the unconscious and involuntary memories of adolescence awakened by his adult sensations of taste, sight, sound, touch, and smell.³

Similarly, novelists today often relate their adult to their adolescent selves. They make adolescence a central theme in their work, like Jenny Diski in her novel, The Dream Mistress. It is based, Diski says, on the transformation wrought in her by her father deserting her and her mother when she was 11, and by her mother’s ensuing depression. A journalist reports:

Diski’s mother refused to work or to sign up for social security. They stopped paying the bills and the rent; soon the bailiffs came and took everything except a bed and a chair.… Eventually, Diski and her mother would be thrown out.… In the weeks before that abrupt and final humiliation, however, there was a quieter, more corrosive humbling to be endured. ‘We had to walk around with no shoes on,’ says Diski, ‘So the people underneath wouldn’t know they’d taken the carpets.’⁴

The scene, we are told, has left its mark. Diski, now middle-aged, continues to recreate the emptiness of the flat of her pre-teens both in her fiction and in her life. She still lives in a flat she keeps bare of carpets in memory of the bare, uncarpeted home where she lived with her mother when she was 11.

Memories of the formative impact of their pre-teen and teenage years on their adult lives are not, of course, confined to novelists and media celebrities. Ordinary, uncelebrated women and men similarly remember their adolescent years making them, for better or worse, the grownups they are today. Kate, a retired social worker, tells me it was her teens that launched her into the two driving forces of her life – sex and politics. She remembers a specific incident impelling the passions firing her adult years. Like the incidents described by the Duchess of York and by Jenny Diski, the teenage incident Kate remembers involves her mother. She says:

One day my mother made me a dress which was so pretty, with a full skirt, in a light boil, and a big sash round the waist, and she allowed me to go and buy my own hat to go with it, and I felt so different in this dress. And I found I had a power – I had sexual power. That’s when I discovered it. Because boys looked at me, and turned their heads. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is great. This is an area where I shine.’

Women and men replying to a 1993 Mass Observation survey asking them to describe their experiences of growing up also often dwelt on transforming incidents from their teens.⁵ Often, like Kate, they remembered incidents involving sex. A journalist wrote of the adult reverberations of his ‘tearful and anxious mother’ confessing to him, on his seventeenth birthday, that he was illegitimate. A business executive remembered train-spotting. He wrote of ‘dirty old men … sitting next to me in cinemas or in single compartments on trains and fumbling, etc.’. He remembered not telling his parents. He remembered his ‘amazement’ on discovering, when he was 13, that ‘my father did know what “rude F” and “rude C” were and that he could enjoy a dirty joke’.

Others writing for this same Mass Observation survey remembered the crippling effect on them as adolescents of their parents’ sexual inhibitions and repressions. A woman teacher wrote of feeling left in ‘a moral vacuum’ as a teenager by the ‘terrific sense of embarrassment about sex in our family. We never talked about it’. Another teacher recalled finding himself divided for the first time in his teens from his parents by both their and his sexual prudery and inhibition about talking about his then increasing sexual attraction to men, not women. He blamed his resulting adolescent alienation from his parents for his continuing tendency not to talk with others about his feelings, whether or not they involved sex. Others recalled the fateful effect on their subsequent lives not of keeping their feelings from their parents but of their parents accusing them, for the first time when they were teenagers, of keeping from them, deceiving them, and lying to them about what they felt and did.

Both women and men seeking psychiatric help often link their ills to their teens. Surveying all first referrals to a consultant psychiatrist through the early 1990s, I found that many dated the first onset of their symptoms to their preteen and teenage years. Forty-year-old Gail, for instance, linked her recurring anxiety and panic attacks, for which she now sought help, to her pre-teen unhappiness when her father, to whom she had been a ‘daddy’s girl’, left her and her mother for another woman. Gail was 12. Although her father still lives in a nearby town, Gail grieved, she has never seen him since.

Others in my survey – men as well as women – attributed their problems not to losing and being distanced from those to whom they were attached in their pre-teen and teenage years, but, quite the reverse, to their fathers and others becoming too close to them, and abusing them in their teens. Harry, in his mid-thirties, linked his nervousness and heavy-drinking, beginning in his late teens, to being repeatedly sexually abused – between the age of 13 and 14 – by an elder in his church. Others tell similar tales. Stories of sexual abuse in adolescence are legion. Both women and men often tell tales of their nascent puberty prompting those they knew well into sexually abusing them, just as the novelist Nabokov depicts it prompting his fictional character, Humbert Humbert, into sexually abusing his 10-year-old stepdaughter, Lolita. But this is often forgotten.

Forgetting adolescence

Despite outrage about the film of Lolita, and despite the current furore about sexual abuse, its frequent beginnings in adolescence, and the adolescent onset of the ill-effects of earlier abuse, are often forgotten. So too are other effects of adolescence in shaping the psychology of both sexes, for good and ill. Instead, psychologists and psychiatrists explain the adults they study and treat in terms of their immediate life experiences. Women and men often explain themselves similarly – in terms of what is currently happening to them. They explain themselves in terms of their immediate well-being and woes. They explain themselves in terms of their biology, with women often attributing their troubles to the vagaries of their reproductive systems. Or, likening themselves to other members of their families, both women and men explain themselves in terms of their genes. Alternatively, influenced by recent developments in psychology, they explain themselves in terms of their early attachment to, and separation from, those to whom they were closest as children.⁶

In the process they forget adolescence. Why? Is it because adolescence, as hinted in some of the above-quoted memories, is a nightmare we would rather forget? Certainly therapists – including Freudian therapist, Paul van Heeswyk, in his enchanting 1997 book, Analysing Adolescence⁷ – often begin their observations about young people with the words of the shepherd in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale:

I would there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.⁸

Others compare the advances and reverses of adolescence to those of the French Revolution:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.⁹

They also refer to the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel about adolescence, The Go-Between, as does a journalist, reporting a recent study of disorders in young people,¹⁰ who notes: ‘We may celebrate youth in the abstract but in practice we often behave as if it is a foreign country rather than the place we all came from’.¹¹

Another journalist, reviewing Kids – a film about underage sex, AIDS, and drugs – writes, ‘it makes you confront things you’d do anything to avoid either as relatively uninvolved spectators or as anxious parents’.¹²

Those I interviewed for this book often told me they wanted to avoid and forget their teens. A man in his late seventies complained, ‘God help me, my teens have clung to me all my life.’ A woman in her eighties, recalling her love for a man killed in the Spanish Civil War, emphasised, when I asked whether she was a teenager when she met him, ‘Oh no. My teenage years were the worst in my life. I met him in my twenties. That’s when everything that was best began happening.’ Her teens, she added, were best consigned to oblivion.

Younger people, whom I asked to record their memories of adolescence, also often indicated that they wanted to forget. One man dismissed his teens with the quip, ‘Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’. Others – men more often than women – wrote nothing. Or they wrote that they had forgotten. A 21-year-old, apologising for his lack of response, wrote ‘Sorry, it’s being [sic] too long – I can’t remember anything’. A 19-year-old excused her meagre reply in terms of forgetfulness making her memories of the past too unreliable. ‘Often,’ she solemnly declared, ‘my memories may not clearly be true but interspersed by dreams – and affected by photographs.’

A few younger teenagers (more often boys than girls), asked to write down their dreams, claimed they had not only forgotten them but never had any to remember.¹³ More often older teenagers (again more boys than girls), as though heaving a sigh of relief that the disturbing dreams of their early teens were over, wrote that they were now free of them. A 17-year-old, after recalling a recurring childhood nightmare of being made to sing in church as he had been made to sing in choir school till his voice broke, wrote: ‘I very rarely have nightmares any more, most of my dreams, I think, are about normal situations which happen through my own eyes. I find I remember my dreams a lot less than I used to.’

Adults similarly claim not to remember. They too want to forget. The psychoanalyst André Green speaks to the disquiet of many adults about remembering their teens when, summing up his contribution to a conference about adolescent psychosis and madness, he concluded, ‘We outgrow adolescence with the idea of having lived through an exalting moment that we will never forget, but, in reality, sometimes when we look back we realize we had a narrow escape.’¹⁴

Perhaps it is precisely the feeling of psychoanalysts, as well as of psychologists and psychiatrists, that they themselves had ‘a narrow escape’ and want to forget their own adolescence, that contributes to their forgetting the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Divided selves
• PART III Divided loves
• PART IV Grandiosity and romance
• PART V Conclusion
• Notes
• Index