As adults, we are often struck by the thought: âIf I could just live my teenage years over again with the knowledge and experience I have now, I wouldnât have made such a mess of it; I wouldâve known how the world works and have been much better at finding my way in it.â At the same time, it is far less common to hear someone say that he would like to live his childhood over again. That is understandable, as who of us would like to subject ourselves once more to the dos and donâts of our parents, just to be able to seek shelter and hide behind them again?
The desire to live our teenage years over again probably reveals how much worrying and suffering we went through then, and how much we wish we had been better prepared for that stage of life. Unfortunately, it is not to be; life is a one-way street. However, in working with children and adolescents, we can still get a sense of what it was like when we were as old as they are now. âHow would he feel right now? Is he struggling in the same way I used to?â A rowdy group of overgrown boys I bike past or the children of friends who come by always give me food for thought about how I was back then.
The excerpt below illustrates that working with and getting closer to an adolescent is not always easy. In particular, when adults want the adolescent to do something â or not do something â they are in for a struggle. This is something encountered by parents when they want their sweetie to come home at a certain time, by teachers and by myself, as a forensic psychologist.
I visit Byron, an adolescent suspect in a number of break-ins. He is exceptionally courteous and uses formal terms of address when talking with me. He has been well informed about the importance of the psychological evaluation and the positive impression he needs to make, and is therefore highly cooperative: âI know that you have to ask me all kinds of questions and I will do my best to answer them. Itâs important that you get a good idea of who I am.â Itâs easy for him to talk about his parents, school, friends and hobbies and the consultation goes by quickly. Nevertheless, I have an empty feeling; itâs difficult to concentrate and our interaction does not deepen. The moment I ask him about the alleged break-ins, the tension noticeably mounts. Byron unwittingly switches to an informal term of address. He becomes angry and answers only in short sentences. In less than ten minutes, you can cut the tension with a knife and Byron has become flat-out rude: âWhere do you get off asking me things you already know? I already told the police everything. Go ask them if you want to know something. Theyâve already written it all down, so leave me alone!â Soon after, I break off the consultation before the time is up. It wasnât going to be possible to put myself into Byronâs world and get to know things about him.
Irritated, I get up, dissatisfied with the fact I wasnât able to connect with him, though I did get a lot of diagnostic information. There is only a small chance that he is remorseful and ashamed about what he has done. If he were, it should have emerged earlier in the evaluation and preferably would have been brought up by him. Socially desirable answers given afterwards usually carry a lot less weight for an evaluator.
Byron attempts to adapt his behaviour, but he reveals himself after a time; he canât stand being required to undergo a psychological evaluation. I make a sincere attempt to get a deeper understanding of him, but he repels my advances, knowing what could then come to the surface.
Those who work with adolescents recognise the prototypes from a mile away. You feel like you donât need to talk with them in order to make out what it is like to be in their shoes. The super-polite adolescent, who breezes through school and always has a friendly smile on his face when you talk with him, but who also makes you think: âGet a life!â They are the stereotypical chess-playing boys or piano-playing girls. They are quiet and well-behaved, too grown-up for their 15 years and devoid of almost anything playful. You feel their inhibition towards experiencing pleasure and they take everything very seriously. At 12, they are already writing letters to Amnesty International. Most teachers would call them the ideal pupils to have in the class. Their counterparts are just as stereotypical. If they happen to have brought their schoolbag, it doesnât contain the right books. They politely shake your hand when you first meet them, but you sense the subtext: âWhat are you gonna tell me?â They donât feel obligated to meet the expectations of parents or teachers. The boys wear baggy jeans, while the girlsâ style is gothic. They can sometimes be witty and challenging for a teacher, but this is mostly as long as he plays their âgameâ and doesnât make any real demands of them.
The serious adolescent who writes to Amnesty shows solidarity with people suffering from injustice, something which indicates a well-developed conscience. Yet the combination of his writing and the way in which he presents himself makes you think: âThis is too restrained; why canât he just let go a little more?â The stereotype of the indifferent pupil is also âtoo muchâ: why canât he put some effort into something at school or get a part-time job, and what does he have against following school rules and taking books to school? It is as though he has no ideals â as though his conscience is empty in that respect.
In working with adolescents, I let myself be fascinated by them and I quickly push my stereotypical interpretation aside: what has there been in the chess-playing boyâs life that makes him take everything so seriously, to whom or what is the gothic girl directing her declaration of independence and what makes Byron so angry? It may very well be that the chess-playing boy has always had a slight feeling of guilt without ever having done anything âwrongâ, while Byron has no remorse whatsoever after the robbery and is simply angry that he is locked up. Has Byron always been so quickly offended and why or when did this vulnerability emerge?
When I am talking with an adolescent, all kinds of different hypotheses about what makes him tick seem to spring into my mind. To understand his attitude towards life, I also attempt to imagine his developmental history. Focusing on the development of the conscience, for example, two questions can be posed: what is the current level of his development and how did this come to be? It is only once the developmental history is known that the significance of the current state of development can be properly assessed. After all, it makes an enormous difference whether the rebellious gothic girl we now see had, in the past, been a cheerful, unaffected gymnastics fan with a spotless developmental history, or whether she had been quiet and emotionally neglected.
In this book, the mental and physical growth of children is thought to proceed as a gradual process with successive stages. In each stage, the child is faced with a new developmental task. While the discussion of these developmental tasks takes place at an abstract level, it is important to realise that the following pertains to living creatures, as young or small as they might be, all of whom go about their development in their own way and at their own pace.
Below, I present an outline of normal, healthy emotional development from birth to adolescence. I first discuss how a childâs development can be theoretically described in terms of stages, memory, emotion regulation and suchlike. Important developmental areas, such as motor skills, learning ability and neurobiology, will only be addressed indirectly, as this developmental outline serves to facilitate understanding of the development of the conscience in the following chapters. Lastly, the development from baby to adolescent is outlined in relation to the development of the conscience.
1.1 A developmental model
1.1.1 Stage-based development
Stage model
In the first six years of life, the developmental stages follow one another in rapid succession and are accompanied by spectacular changes. A baby, toddler or preschooler can seem like a superfast computer that develops at a lightning-quick pace. He is not aware of this himself, but that is just as well, because if he also had to think about everything he does or experiences, he would run out of time to progress. During the childâs first three years, in fact, he is not even capable of thinking about what he wants, does or experiences: he just âisâ. He lives in his emotional, rational and physical world without being able to reflect upon it. It is only after his speech and, thereby, his ability to symbolise have developed somewhat that he is able to think about his situation and himself. In six years, a baby, who is competent yet entirely dependent on his parents, develops into a relatively autonomous, independent creature. He then passes through the usually uneventful latency stage, roughly corresponding to primary school age, which is mainly characterised by robust cognitive development. Puberty and adolescence, at which time the child attends secondary school, are turbulent and tense. Once the child becomes an adult, perhaps ultimately becoming a parent himself, he is inevitably succeeded by a new generation of children and adolescents.
Even as adults, we carry our earlier developmental stages with us in all kinds of ways. A man might sometimes feel literally like a teenager again when he is too afraid to go up and talk to a beautiful woman, or a woman going out to dinner with a male colleague might feel like a schoolgirl again, endlessly wavering about what to wear that evening. In this chapter, we will see that the experiences in the first years of life determine to a large extent the babyâs later outlook as an adolescent or adult.
Psychoanalyst Jan Vandeputte describes a psychotherapy consultation with an 18-year-old narcissistic male who is wearing a T-shirt with the text âFuck reality!â This vignette shows how the psychotherapist attempts to create a treatment context in which he and the young man can play with multiple meanings of reality, in order to connect with him about what he has taken with him from the past.1 The therapist does so initially by not emphasising the sexuality of the text, but by addressing the ambivalence evident in âFuck reality!â The young man wants to show that he doesnât care about reality, but this attitude is at the same time a new reality that can be discussed. With the choice of text on his T-shirt, he reveals â probably entirely unconsciously â his problem.
That morning he came into my consultation room wearing a T-shirt with the words FUCK REALITY! in bilious green, screaming letters. The typical announcement of his âprogrammeâ was, paradoxically enough, naturally a genuine attempt to challenge his therapist by playing with reality, just like a preschooler would. âAre you up for the challenge?â is the question he is asking me with his T-shirt. Because you can be sure that, on the morning of the day of his therapy appointment, this adolescent had carefully chosen which T-shirt he would wear. During the consultation, he talked about his favourite rap music, which featured the incessant shouting of âfuckâ and âmotherfuckerâ. One line he quoted was âThe biggest motherfucker will always be your fatherâ.
We then discussed the history of his father and mother, who had experimented with swinging while he was going through puberty, and the fact that he couldnât stand the thought of their sexuality. We also discussed his ambivalent feelings towards the reality of therapy (and me), in which he found the invitation to talk so difficult. All of this, because of a T-shirt!2
Transformation
An adolescent in the present is also always connected to his past, as the attainments of a completed stage do not disappear when the child enters a subsequent stage. On the contrary, they lay the foundation for the new stage, in which they are integrated and sometimes also changed. Cognitive-developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this âtransformationâ: the child constantly relates himself to reality by fitting it into his own world or by adapting his thinking to what the world is like.3 Metaphorically speaking, it is not as if new storeys keep getting placed on the old structure; rather, the placement of each new storey leads to a modification of the underlying structure and the two are connected through continuous construction. This is usually not a quiet process and, certainly during puberty, the entire structure shakes â and the whole family along with it.
Capacity to handle the burden
The better the preceding stage has been worked through and completed â that is, the better the child has mastered the tasks of the specific stage â the better equipped the child is to enter into the new stage. The completion of a stage should build up the childâs capacity to handle the burden of the new stage. This is why the diagnosis of an adolescent also delves into his early development: were there circumstances at the time that hampered development and potentially created a shaky foundation? This being the case, new developmental tasks would be an attack rather than a challenge, since the child might have already had little capacity to deal with the burden. However, it is also not the case that early developmental years dictate a childâs destiny. Most children are resilient, and less favourable developments during a particular stage can also be compensated for at some point. This is referred to as âplasticityâ.
1.1.2 The transformation of the past
Still, delving into a childâs early developmental history is easier said than done. After all, how does one obtain reliable information about it? Naturally, parents can be asked about their childâs development but, rather than this telling you how it really was, they will provide their own history of how they experienced their childâs development. If a diagnostician is good at reading between the lines, the parental consultation provides information about both the adolescentâs development and the subjective experience of his parents. It is sometimes also possible to briefly ask about their own family background to see whether there are issues that recur over the generations. Unfortunately, it is not possible for the adolescent himself to tell you about his earliest years, even though you might sometimes be served up a vivid event from his infancy: âI was stung by a wasp and lay crying in the pram, but nobody heard me.â This kind of supposed memory is devised afterwards, probably arising from the notion that he often felt alone as a child and perhaps inspired by a photo of himself in the pram. The reasons why he cannot have such memories are made clear by memory science, whi...
