Adolescence

The Crises of Adjustment

Simon Meyerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317340669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this volume and its companion Adolescence and Breakdown, originally published in 1975, members of the Adolescent Department at the Tavistock Clinic and of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, together with other leading experts on the subject, present a unique study of adolescence.

Of all living species only human beings go through a period of adolescence – and because the conflicting influences that adolescents encounter both within themselves and in the outside world are so complex, even normal adolescence is a time of crises and adjustment.

While Adolescence and Breakdown traces what happens when these crises are not sufficiently well negotiated, the present volume is devoted to the dynamics and complexities of normal adolescence. The topics debated and explored include: the nature of puberty; family relationships; change and personality; adolescent sexuality; adolescents and authority; protest and politics; adolescence and creativity; groups, subcultures and countercultures in the adolescent world.

1
The Early Years

A. HYATT WILLIAMS

As Freud pointed out nearly seventy years ago, most of the problems which arise in adolescence are really rooted in infancy and there is an interaction between constitutional endowment with its resultant array of proclivities on the one hand and the circumstances of life as they impinge on the individual on the other. What happens depends upon how the polarities of these interlinking influences can be resolved. The factors which influence development, whether intrapsychic or interpersonal, are a good deal more complicated than one can describe briefly. Only some of these factors will be traced.

In some ways the easiest to delineate are the invariable patterns which can be seen in everyone. For example, the human baby, requiring such a very long period of nurture, is unique in the animal kingdom. At the age at which most of the higher mammals are capable of separate survival and fending for themselves, the human being is still utterly dependent upon parental care. The young monkey and the young baby bom on the same day respond to life’s experiences in quite different ways. For a long time the young monkey is very much quicker to learn than the baby and races ahead of the baby in almost every field of endeavour. Chief of these is mobility. At the age of two years however, when the baby is far from entering its most intense learning years, the monkey slows down and the baby passes the anthropoid in almost every field except that of movement. At about the age of two, the monkey is reaching sexual maturity but the young baby is still negotiating the various phases of infantile sexuality, still dependent upon the care of adults. It seems that the onset of sexual maturity has a marked influence upon the halting, or at least slowing, of further learning potential. This may be relevant later when one comes to consider the way in which an all too early puberty is sometimes associated with a fizzling out of learning potentials.

The development of the young infant may be considered in several different ways. The standard psychoanalytic approach associated with the name of Freud involves the recognition of certain phases of emotional development beginning with the earliest phase, the oral, going on to the anal, the phallic and the infantile genital or Oedipal stage. Then in a more or less decisive way infantile sexuality undergoes a recession round about the fifth or sixth year and from then on until the first stirrings of puberty there occurs the so-called latency period. This period is very important because a great proportion of the young person’s energy is devoted to social activities, learning activities and the task of acquiring poise and balance in the environment, beginning of course with the family and going on to the school and other groupings.

One of Freud’s colleagues, Karl Abraham, divided the oral phase into two stages: the first associated with sucking (oral erotic), and the second when the milk-teeth begin to erupt, with biting (oral sadistic). This is quite meaningful because in terms of object relationships the sucking relationship is very different from the biting relationship to an object or a part-object. An object technically means a person who is the object of a form of relationship, e.g. sucking, biting, loving. The first object is the mother, but in the earliest phase of life she is perceived and experienced not as a whole object, the mother, but in partobject terms, namely the nipple, the breast and various other parts which are in one way or another related to the young infant and its needs. The young infant himself consists of an animated bundle of helplessness dominated by alimentary activities, tissue with vast potential surrounding a food tube. Need and greed can manifest themselves from the earliest phase of infancy onwards. When the milk-teeth erupt, direct pain can be inflicted upon the nipple and breast and of course other objects and part-objects can be attacked similarly. The way in which the teeth are used depends not only upon gratification and frustration of primary needs but also upon the infant’s innate quantum of aggressiveness. The eruption of the milk-teeth is often associated with weaning, that is the loss of the primary object, the breast. Freud refers to this in a very meaningful way in the third of his three essays on sexuality. To quote Freud,

‘on the psychical side the process of finding an object for which preparations have been made from earliest childhood is completed. At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that the instinct loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ giving some satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.’

The next phase of emotional development described by Freud was the anal phase, dominated by toilet training. The anal phase reverses the main feature of the oral phase in that instead of demands being made by the infant upon the mother, or her substitute, there is a situation in which she makes demands upon the infant and in which there are more or less strenuous efforts to control one aspect of his bodily and mental functioning. He is asked to part not only with something regarded by him as part of himself, but, at a time not of his own choosing. These experiences can easily make the infant feel persecuted by the demands. But the infant can easily wreak vengeance by frustrating the parent in refusing the demand. Freud described anal eroticism as the pleasure associated with both the retention of the faeces by the infant within himself and also the pleasure obtained from the expulsion of the bowel content, particularly when the infant does this from choice. Thus the anal phase is dominated by object-relatedness. The anal phase, as Freud described it, is characterised by a triad of traits, based on the wish to retain and the wish to expel. The faeces are felt to be a part of the infant at first and then to become not a part of him. This stage can have a marked effect on the later development of character. In a paper written in 1908 called ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’, Freud described how fixations at the anal stage can cause an emphasis on parsimony, that is the refusal to part with money, but also extending to other things like giving—derived from a reluctance and refusal to part with faeces. The second characteristic in the anal triad is cleanliness and this is a reaction formation against the wish to soil and dirty. The third characteristic is orderliness and in this the individual seems to take on the characteristics of the controlling parent in endeavouring to have everything just right and under his control.

Freud described the anal stage of development as the anal-sadistic stage because at this particular time in the relationships between parent and child, and the child and his own stools, the characteristics of self-assertion, of withholding and evacuating can usually be associated with a great deal of aggressiveness and cruelty which seems particularly to gather round these activities. This is not to contradict the fact that there is also cruelty derived from the oral phase. But there is a difference. Oral cruelty is a very much more frightening and devouring thing, particularly when one sees it in criminal acts like mugging, which involves robbery by violence. Anal cruelty can be seen also in relationship to obedience to controlling forces: sometimes they are the forces of law and order; sometimes the forces of more subversive organisations. Abraham, from his former speciality as an embryologist, again subdivided Freud’s phases of emotional development into an anal retentive phase and an anal expulsive phase and stated and described how these two phases differ in the kind of object relations and the kind of phantasies which dominate at these particular times and influence later relationships.

Although Freud had drawn attention to the Oedipus complex in his book The Interpretation of Dreams published in 1900, he did not describe the phallic phase until 1923. During this next phase the little boy is dominated by conscious and unconscious feelings about his penis and concern for its safety. The little girl is concerned with the absence of a penis and resentful about her feeling of organ inferiority. This must be the earliest determining cause of recruitment to Women’s Lib. The phallic phase in little boys can be characterised by proud, swashbuckling, daring, defiant behaviour. It has an exhibitionist flavour. There seems to be a denial of fear and anxiety although this denial often wears thin and the main anxiety is associated with the fear of loss of the penis experienced as castration anxiety. This is the phase at which little boys often play with matches and light fires, and also the time when there is often a recrudescence of nocturnal bed-wetting. The little girl, feeling castrated, develops penis envy and moves to the father as compensation. This phase merges into the infantile, genital or Oedipal phase, according to classical Freudian theory, from the age of three to five. In the Oedipus situation or the infantile genital organisation, the child develops a primarily loving and erotic attitude towards the parent of the opposite sex together with rivalry, jealousy and sometimes hostility towards the parent of the same sex. Thus little boys will tend to love their mothers and be in rivalry with, and sometimes fear, their fathers but they will also model themselves upon their fathers. Little girls will develop a primarily loving relationship with their fathers and develop rivalry, jealousy and hostility as well as identification with their mothers.

It will be seen that there is really a four-fold relationship in the Oedipus situation. The little boy has a libidinal link with the mother and a wish to be like his father, but at the same time a tendency to develop a hostile relationship with him or with his internal image. In miniscule, however, the reverse situation holds good with a rivalry and hostile situation in relationship to mother and a libidinal link with father. This depends upon the extent to which the little boy has within himself a psychic organisation in which he either feels himself to be, or behaves as if he were, a little girl. Similarly, the little girl has a primarily libidinal link with father and a rivalling, primarily hostile relationship with mother. But the opposite is represented in miniscule exactly as in the case of the little boy. This consists of a loving libidinal link with mother and a hostile rivalry with father. It might be seen from these formulations, first clearly set out by Freud at the turn of the century, where homosexuality of a psychic kind originates. One can visualise situations in which the balance between male and female feelings runs counter to the ordinary biological direction and how sensitive and subtle identity difficulties can multiply.

But bisexuality is part of our human endowment so that however strong the emphasis is upon the heterosexual link and the development of heterosexual object relationships, there is always some representation of the homosexual link and some development of emotional but not acted out homosexual relationships. A good deal of the later difficulties in adolescence, for example, depend upon the decisiveness of these steps towards sexual identity which are taken when the child is under the sway of the infantile genital organisation.

Reference has already been made to the latency period—that period of apparent quiescence and righteous social imitation which follows in the wake of the massive repression of the Oedipus complex. This comparatively conflict-free period of latency is broken by the stirrings of puberty (see next chapter).

During childhood there are many other factors at work. There is the growing complexity of the relationship between the child, mother and father and other siblings who precede or succeed him.

There are subtler rivalries based upon such factors as position in the family: what the immediately older sibling was like, how the individual was treated by this particular sibling, what the immediate younger sibling was like and what the others were like. The only child has a psychodynamic make-up of his own and so does the eldest child, the youngest child as well as the second child.

Level of intelligence is, of course, important. Within the social environment, particularly the family environment, a child who is vastly lower in intelligence from the rest of the family, or vastly higher, is likely to be to some extent mal-adapted. Of course frequently, but not necessarily, the one that is higher in intelligence has a far better chance of adjusting at home or finding a satisfactory peer group. Also intelligence does seem to give a person an instrument of retrospective examination, a review of what has gone on and a capacity to learn from experience so that future happenings can to some extent be guided. Incidentally, the conscious direction of life can be effective only to a very limited extent. Various difficulties are inevitable and a number of difficulties which are not inevitable do arise by contingency. Some of these are very important, such as early separation from the mother or her surrogate which was first described by Bowlby and then elaborated in convincing detail with full visual evidence by the Robertsons. Separations between the ages of six months and three years are very important in future character development and personality integration. Most very disturbed adolescents, such as severe delinquents, seem to have had some early experiences of loss which they have been unable to work through. As has been stated by Sir Keith Joseph, in his address to the Playgroups Association, ‘the cycle of deprivation’ tends to be worse when the social environment, the family history and the personalities of the immediate forebears, together with the possibility of genetic factors, conspire together to reinforce an already bad situation. If, to this already worsened situation, there are further contingencies such as separation, severe painful illness, cruelty or sexual seduction, it will be seen how indelible the experiences can be and how the best endeavours of the remedial services can be frustrated. In minor degree, of course, separation which is not worked through is exceedingly common, the more so since the Second World War when most mothers of young children do go out to work. Of course, it varies considerably with the length of time the child is left and the way in which the mother compensates. Most important, of course, is the way the particular child can adapt to frustration and can sustain some kind of contact with the absent mother by retaining an introjected image of the loved mother during the periods when she is away for long periods.

One of the measures which looked as though it was a thoroughly good thing at the time and which turned out to be disastrous when viewed in retrospect was the wartime evacuation and separation of children from their parents. Not only was there a great deal of separation and deprivation as far as human relationships were concerned, but there was also a loss of geographical and temporal security and social displacement added to the strain so that the children became disturbed partly by their natures and partly because they had to leave their mothers at a crucial time of anxiety, as well as being called upon to adjust sometimes to an altogether different social environment. No wonder they became ill-adapted and part of their maladaptation was regarded by the people upon whom they were billeted as typical of their district, social class or way of life. Alienation, of course, took place at this point and tended to get worse. Once established, this is very difficult to remedy, and for many years after the war one saw what an effect evacuation continued to have upon individual development.

Traumatic incidents, whether involving a threat to life, castration threat, or exciting events such as seduction of various kinds, can produce far-reaching effects upon the development of the character and personality. Before 1897 Freud thought that all hysterics had been actually seduced.

I wish to turn to one of the concepts which I have found useful in understanding early development. It is Bion’s concept of the container and the contained. It would seem that in the early phases of infantile development the infant is a totally inadequate container for the powerful unorganised impulses of which he is the owner. One of the main functions of the mother or her surrogate is to act as a container so that some of the difficulties can be relayed to her. She can be filled with them and then, if she is a good mother or mother surrogate, she is able in some way to hold, mull over and improve to some extent, so that what she relays back to the young child has been rendered somewhat more psychically acceptable and the infant is now more able to cope with those elements. If the infant or young child is endowed with extremely strong impulses or somewhat distorted ones and the parent or surrogate is not able to contain the various direct or indirect communications, this favourable transaction of having the communication improved, relayed back in a form more capable of being worked upon and within the infant’s capacity does not take place. That is, the mother does not know how to emotionally help her child. Sometimes there is simply no response from the mother and the infant can rightly feel misunderstood by not being contained. In other cases, where the mother, for example, is either a schizoid person herself or the so-called schizophrenogenic mother, the communications may be so horrific to the mother that she strips them of all meaning, distorts them and feeds them back to the infant in a much worse state than they were in when they came to her. Thus, what could be a communication with the possibility of growth and development becomes a communication which blights and distorts the development of the infant or young child. It is sometimes in these circumstances that delinquency can be regarded, as Winnicott regarded it, as a surge of optimism following a period of hopelessness. In stealing in particular, or acquisitive delinquency in general, there is some idea that something good exists, that he can get hold of it, but because of old patterns of disappointment and hopelessness, he feels he is in some way justified to try to take it by storm.

The concept of the container and the contained is useful for it applies throughout development. Where this relationship is inappropriate between the two persons or the adolescent and his parent or environment, normal development falters and disturbance and acting-out occurs, partly because of the upset of the balance and partly to find some balance.

At this point I will move to the post-Freudian views of Melanie Klein on early emotional development. Her views supplement and extend but do not contradict Freud’s findings. In 1920 Freud finally abandoned his view that there were not two separate instincts, a sexual one and an aggressive one. In his classic paper ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, he delineated two main instincts which determine human activity. One is the life instinct, which includes instinctual organisations and impulses, and the other is the death instinct, which expresses a constitutional built-in trend towards the limitation of life, finally terminating in the extinguishing of life. Following on from Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud, in 1923, wrote another important monograph, The Ego and the Id, in which he reformulated his theory of instincts and delineated a structure of the personality into ego, superego and id. Melanie Klein started off by fully accepting Freud’s theory of life and death instincts and the ultimate polarity of these two opposing currents in determining our human behaviour. She also stated that the important psychic mechanisms of projection and introjection begin from the moment of birth and, in fact, recent unpublished work indicates that there is some evidence of psychic life before birth (although Melanie Klein does not say so). By the mechanism of projection the infant is able to explore the environment, including all the people in it and particularly those closest to him. The repeated interchanges of projection and introjection, reprojection and reintrojection cause a gradual build-up of the ego of the infant.

In the earliest phases there is no concept of a whole person but rather a perception of parts of persons. For example, mother is perceived as a nipple or a breast, as touching hands, engulfing arms and so on. In the earliest phase of life the dominant kind of anxiety present in the infant is what Melanie Klein calls persecutory anxiety. All approaches to the infant are designated as hostile and persecutory until they are proved otherwise. During this early phase and owing to the built-in tendency of the mother to care for and cherish young infants, the infant experiences the caring, feeding mother as a good feeding breast, and she gradually becomes delineated from unpleasant persecutory experiences. So two sets of experiences begin to be codified: that which is not wanted or the absence of that which is wanted. On the one hand the gratifying experience is supposed to derive from the good object, and the bad experiences derived from the bad object—both still perceived in part-object terms. This early differentiation into good, gratifying experiences coming from a good, gratifying breast, and bad, persecutory experiences stemming from a bad, persecutory breast are very important. Those individuals who are unable to separate the good from the bad breast seem to be vulnerable to later confusion and persecutory feelings. With the re-emergence of infantile feeling at adolescence, good and bad get mixed up together. We see the end product of this muddle of good and bad parts clinically in some of the more disturbed and disintegrated adolescents.

Melanie Klein described how the anxieties of a persecutory type reach a kind of zenith or climax at about the end of three months or so after birth, lasting over a few weeks or months. She labelled this somewhat extended period of time the paranoid schizoid position. Paranoid, because the predominant kind of anxiety is persecutory and schizoid b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• CONTENTS
• 1 The Early Years
• 2 Puberty and Phases of Adolescence
• 3 Adolescence and Change
• 4 Adolescence and the Family
• 5 Adolescence and Authority
• 6 Adolescence and Sexuality
• 7 Sex Role Dilemmas of Modern Adolescents
• 8 Adolescence and Politics: the Student Revolution
• 9 Adolescence and Creativity
• 10 Adolescents and Groups, Subcultures, Countercultures
• Index