Adolescence

Inge Wise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367322991
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910609
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'Adolescence - when we are no longer children and have not yet reached adulthood - is a time of much disturbance, change and potential for growth. The adolescent is confronted with a body that stretches, changes and grows in all directions, as does her or his mind: he is no longer who he was.'- Inge Wise from her Introduction Adolescence is a turbulent period of time in life. Adolescents experience hormonal and physical changes that affect their mood and emotions. Psychoanalysis can help them resolve these new and often confusing feelings.In this collection, Inge Wise has gathered together a wide range of papers, dealing with issues such as adolescent violence, suicidal feelings, and addiction. Other papers explore psychoanalytic definitions of adolescence and central psychoanalytic contributions to the understanding of adolescence.

Chapter One
Violence as a defence against breakdown in adolescence

Donald Campbell

Introduction

The individual who is prone to violent behaviour as a means of resolving internal conflicts is influenced by a continuing, conscious or unconscious fantasy life that is dominated by violence.¹ In this chapter I will examine the choice and function of a violent role model or ego ideal before and after puberty and the part it plays in reinforcing violence as a defence against breakdown in adolescence. I will illustrate my points with case material from a 16-year-old adolescent I will call Stan, who physically attacked another boy. After being taunted by an intimidating bully named Grummond, Stan took his father's cricket bat and hit Grummond repeatedly. He was quickly restrained by a number of his friends, although he struggled to inflict more injury on Grummond.

A general view of Stan's violence

In this chapter I define violence in Nigel Walker's (1991) terms as the intended infliction of bodily harm. I have found it useful to distinguish between two types of violence as described by Glasser (1979), self-preservative and sadistic. The aim of a self-preservative act of violence is the negation of a threat to physical or psychological survival.² In speaking about psychological survival I am referring to that which we associate with our identity, with a stability of the self that we may experience as a state of well-being. Psychological survival is dependent on many different factors, such as self-esteem, safety, biological needs and good enough relationships, and is threatened when any of these components are at risk. Fonagy & Target (1995) have linked a reliance upon violence to a developmental failure to meet the fundamental need of every infant to find his own mind, his intentional state, in the mind of the object. When the child cannot find itself in the mind of its mother due to her depression or psychotic state, the child relies less on words to engage her mind and more upon actions directed at the mother's body in order to create a presence in her mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of sadistic acts to dominate the victim's mind. In his treatment of individuals who perpetrated apparently random assaults, Sohn (1995) found that a series of losses, real or imagined, resulted in early failure to sublimate aggression and develop a language through which to project feelings. This, in turn, increased his patients' expression of violent muscularity.

Sadistic violence differs from self-preservative violence in that it aims to make the victim suffer and pleasure is taken in watching that suffering. The fundamental difference between these two types of violence is in the relation to the object, the target. In the sadistic attack it is paramount that the object should not be destroyed, but be preserved in order to be seen to suffer. The object is not eliminated, but controlled. The impact on the victim of a self-preservative attack is irrelevant once the threat to the attacker's survival has been removed.

Stan recognized, after the attack, that he felt absolutely no regret or guilt about what he had done to Grummond and hated himself "for not doing the job properly and finishing him off. For Stan the person and the threat were synonymous. While Grummond existed he posed a threat. Although Stan's violence was essentially self-preservative and as such served a defensive function, it should be perceived as a sign of disturbance. As we learn more about Stan we will see that his attack fulfilled a fantasy that was based on a violent image of who he was as a man. This fantasy, or ego ideal, like its fulfilment in action, functioned to protect Stan from primitive anxieties that were heightened by conflicts associated with adolescence.

The development of the ego ideal

The ego ideal develops in response to the discovery that we are not who we thought we were. As children we learn, to our great disappointment, that we are not the centre of the universe. Our real selves are not omnipotent. Reality disabuses us of the fantasy that we are universally and unconditionally loved. This coincides with inklings that a more powerful person, mother, is somehow responsible for our illusion of self-sufficiency. In an effort to overcome a breakdown in the earliest infant-mother intimacy and restore the illusory relationship with the all-giving mother, the child identifies with and internalizes what Freud referred to as an ego ideal, a kind of role model based on those idealized characteristics of mother, such as omnipotent protection, nourishment and comfort, that the child would like to possess. Later, the father also becomes a role model for the ego ideal as the child separates and individuates itself from the mother. In latency and adolescence the individual chooses other role models from real or fictional, private or public "heroes", or collective ideals. In this way the ego ideal, or role model, develops to help the child as a defence against the normal fears and anxieties associated with being a child: the prospect of separation from or loss of parental love, fears of castration or extinction, loss of control of self and others, sexual impotence, physical weakness, etc.

The "voice of conscience", our super-ego, is primarily prohibitive, conveying the message, "You may not be like this (i.e., like your father or your mother); you may not do all that he or she does; some things are his or her prerogative." These proscriptions defend parental authority. The ego ideal or role model, on the other hand, is prescriptively incorporating the way to behave in order to satisfy ourselves. Its message is, "I would like to be like this (like mother or father)." The super-ego, in turn, measures our achievements against the standards of the role model. If the ego is deemed to have measured up in thought or deed, there is an increase in self-esteem through a feeling of being loved and protected by the super-ego.³ Some perverse and/or antisocial behaviour occurs without conflict, prohibition, or guilt because it wins the superego's approval as the fulfilment of a pathological ego ideal. However, failure to reach the ego ideal's standards arouses feelings of criticism and persecution by the super-ego, resulting in inferiority, shame and disgust. You will remember that Stan hated himself "for not doing the job properly" and finishing Grummond off. Material from Stan's weekly psychotherapy sessions with me at the Clinic will be used to illustrate the development and function of violence as a defence against breakdown in a male adolescent.

Stan's early childhood

Stan was the first-born son of a violent father and a mother who hated being alone with her baby and had great difficulty cuddling him. Stan would not eat with the family in his early years and was often allowed to take food up to his room. Sometimes Stan panicked when he was eating and could not get his food down. When Stan was four years old, the next sibling, John, was born but died after just one day. The family was unable to mourn this loss. When Stan was told of John's death his mother remembers Stan asking, "Who shot him?" After John's death Stan began rocking. Stan's inability to properly mourn his infant brother's death and resolve his guilt about his death wishes towards John made it impossible for him to separate from his brother and let him go. Instead, Stan internalized his brother as a persecuting figure.⁴ Stan told me about a delusion of being occupied by John:

Whenever I felt in a rage I used to think it was my dead brother John's fault. When I was 13 or 14 I thought he was living inside me.

A year after John's death, George was born with a club foot. Three months later Stan started school but had difficulty separating from his mother. He cried a great deal but his mother was preoccupied with meeting the demands of her disabled son. Stan had a repetitive dream during his early days at school of:

... being left alone in a lighted classroom waiting for his mother to pick him up. It was getting darker and darker outside and he was all alone. All the children had been picked up by their parents.

He thinks the dream was actually based on real events and it has haunted him for many years.

Stan became phobic about buttons. He hated having them on his clothes. If his mother left buttons around ready to be sewn back on a garment, Stan would confront her in a paranoid fashion saying, "Why did you leave that lying around? Did you do it deliberately?" Stan had been breast-fed with difficulty for three months because his mother had inverted nipples, One can only speculate that the nipple, represented by a button, had become a persecuting object Meanwhile, Stan and his mother denigrated his violent, underachieving father. In fact, Stan and his father have regularly come to blows for as long as Stan can remember. In response to his father's actual violence, Stan's perception of his mother as destructive towards her children, her physical withdrawal, the longing, vulnerability and rage associated with that, guilt about his infant brother's death, and the experience of being displaced by the most formidable rival—a damaged brother—Stan escaped into a comic-book hero.

Ironman

When Stan was four years old his beloved grandfather introduced him to Ironman. Ironman was a comic book hero (Clayton, 1989) whose real name was Tony Stark. Young Stark triggered a booby trap in Vietnam and a piece of shrapnel lodged in his chest. He was captured but had only one week to live before the shrapnel penetrated his heart. With the help of another prisoner, the renowned Oriental physicist Professor Ho Yinsen, and his laboratory. Stark designed and built a suit of armour with a pacemaker that would keep his heart beating after the shrapnel entered it. Yinsen sacrificed his life to give Stark time to become "activated". Stark, as his alter-ego Ironman, avenged Yinsen's death and embarked on a career of combating any force or person who threatened the security of America or the world. When Stark put on Ironman's armour he became impregnable and his strength was magnified to a superhuman level. But for all his power and invincibility, Ironman did not have a fulfilling long-term heterosexual relationship. In fact, Stark was shot and crippled by a former lover who was mentally disturbed. He could, however, still function normally within his Ironman armour!

Stan's identification with Ironman was delusional; he actually believed that he, Stan, was made of steel. Stan wasn't pretending; he was Ironman. When Stan was about seven years old, he had a chest X-ray. Something told him not to look at the X-rays, but he did, and saw "these little ribs, no steel". His dream was shattered and he felt defenceless. Stan went on to say: "I used to pray, when I should have been studying, that I'd be a werewolf because I knew I wasn't Ironman."

The intimate and dangerous mother

As a child Stan would have had to make sense of a mother who produced a baby that was, in Stan's mind, murdered, and who also gave birth to a son with a club foot. Stan chose as his ego ideal a frighteningly powerful and nearly indestructible macho role model which would keep him safe from the object of his desire, a mother who kills and damages her children in her womb. The parental figure that was represented by Ironman is Stan's father.

However, Stan also believed that he had a special relationship with his mother, whom he felt was the only one who understood him. What he enjoyed most was talking with her at night. They both left their bedroom doors open so that they could talk to each other, as Stan put it, "as two voices and no bodies". Stan dealt with his anxieties about being with his intimate but dangerous mother by keeping her at a distance to ensure there was no physical or sexual contact ("no bodies"). As a young boy, Stan's first solution to this conflict was to get inside Ironman, an exaggeratedly masculine identity. Later, Stan relied upon other violent role models to defend against anxieties about incest. Breakdown in adolescence triggered by conflicts associated with the adolescent phase of development takes many forms. I will consider the defensive function of violence in adolescence only in relation to the dangers of heterosexuality and passivity, and in a peripheral way to the risk of suicide.

The adolescent process

The new realities of hormonal and physiological changes initiated by puberty thrust the body's sexuality and musculature to the centre of the psychic stage and create a conflict with earlier self-images. Increasing awareness of erotic sensations in the genitals, enhanced by childhood masturbation, gives the genitals prominence over oral and anal zones of erotic satisfaction, so that the genital comes to dominate the child's sexual image of his body. The establishment of genital dominance enables adolescents to take over responsibility for their bodies from their parents and develop heterosexual relationships with non-incestuous objects. It is not uncommon for an adolescent who is in search of a gender role identity to accommodate and express his developing adult sexuality to identify with contemporary heroes (e.g. pop stars and sports heroes). The adolescent's choice is likely to be influenced by earlier role models, or ego ideals.

The ego ideal with which Stan identified at puberty when his child's body was developing into a man's was a violently destructive android from the film Blade Runner. This android was a robot with a human body. The android image of himself, like Ironman, was multidetermined. It reflected Stan's alienation from his new sexual body as well as the concrete way that his violent fantasies influenced his choice of a role model who was alive on the outside but only mechanical on the inside.

Violence as a defence against the dangers of heterosexuality

The male adolescent's impulse to achieve genital gratification in intercourse with women revives prepubertal repressed incestuous wishes, which, in turn, strain earlier defensive solutions. In his therapy, Stan moved back and forth between his infantile wishes to get inside his mother (a residue of the earlier wish for intimacy), and his wishes to establish a heterosexual relationship with a non-incestuous object (stimulated by his emerging adult sexuality).

Stan's conscious sexual fantasies were heterosexual. He usually had one-night stands because of his acknowledged anxiety about "being trapped into being good with these girls if I continue with them". This would disarm him because, as he says, "I only feel safe when I am bad". The task of developing a genital relationship with the opposite sex was problematic because of his fear of being disarmed by w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Violence as a defence against breakdown in adolescence
• CHAPTER TWO Working with suicidal adolescents
• CHAPTER THREE Working with adolescents: a pragmatic view
• CHAPTER FOUR Adolescence
• CHAPTER FIVE Working with addicts
• APPENDIX: Agencies working with adolescents
• INDEX