The Adolescent Psyche

Jungian and Winnicottian Perspectives

Richard Frankel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317725022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Adolescence is recognised as a turbulent period of human development. Along with the physical changes of puberty, adolescents undergo significant transformations in the way they think, act, feel and perceive the world. The disruption that is manifest in their behaviour is upsetting and often incomprehensible to the adults surrounding them.
In The Adolescent Psyche Richard Frankel shows how this unique stage of human development expresses through its traumas and fantasies the adolescent's urge towards self-realization.
The impact of contemporary culture on the lives of young people has resulted in an increasing number of adolescents being referred for psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment. Successful outcomes are often difficult to achieve in clinical work with clients of this age-group. The advice and guidelines which Frankel provides will be welcomed by psychotherapists, parents, educators and anyone working with adolescents.

Part I

---

Theoretical perspectives on adolescence

---

Chapter 1

---

Psychoanalytic approaches

---

The cosmos in which we place youth and through which we insight youth will influence its pattern of becoming.

James Hillman

INTRODUCTION

Kaplan (1986) traces the invention of adolescence as a distinct phase of life back to two sources: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's allegorical novel, Emile, written in the mid-eighteenth century, and G. Stanley Hall (the American psychologist responsible for bringing Freud and Jung to America), who, for the first time, in 1904, made the biological process of maturation, puberty, the basis of the social definition of an entire age group (Kett 1977). In exploring psychological theory which attempts to explain and understand the adolescent state of mind, it is important to remember that our contemporary concept of adolescence as a discrete developmental period is a relatively recent phenomena, “conditioned by social forces… reflecting the demographic and industrial conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (ibid., p. 6).

Our theoretical ideas about the psychology of adolescence dramatically influence what we attend to and value as significant during this period of development. The differing theoretical perspectives rest upon a set of implicit assumptions concerning the course and direction of human development, the nature of the psyche, and the psychological implications of a biological process.

I have chosen to review psychoanalytical perspectives in this chapter and Jungian developmental theory in the next for they offer two of the most well-articulated systems of thought on the psychology of adolescence in the depth-psychological tradition. These perspectives are particularly powerful in disclosing key elements of the adolescent maturational process. In examining them, I will show what remains concealed by the theoretical lenses used to explicate this process, and will provide alternative ways of theorizing that brings to light this veiled material.

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF PUBERTY: SIGMUND FREUD

It is inevitable that a book attempting to revision our understanding of adolescent psychology must begin by reckoning with Freud. Much of what we currently say and think about adolescent development originates in Freud's ideas on this subject developed early in the twentieth century. Freud only wrote one major essay exclusively devoted to this topic, “The Transformations of Puberty,” as the final part of his Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality (1905). Most of the other references to adolescence throughout his collected writings assert a negative definition of puberty; Freud repeatedly makes the point that puberty is not, as naively supposed, the first awakening of the sexual instinct in human life. The onset of sexual growth is diphasic: its origin is in childhood, and after a resting period during latency, it re-emerges in puberty. Thus, adolescence is evoked by Freud as a signpost on the road to his real destination—his theory of childhood sexuality. The negative definition clearly asserted by Freud tells us that puberty is not originary in terms of the awakening of the sexual instinct; however, as I will show, Freud does not offer any substantive definition of what puberty is, in and of itself, outside of its relationship to childhood.

Consequently, the deeper we look into the vicissitudes of the sexual instinct in puberty, the more is revealed about early childhood, thus creating a structure of investigation that rests upon a theory of recapitulation that pervades the essence of Freud's analysis of adolescence and is taken up, in different ways, by the major psychoanalytical writers on adolescence after Freud. The theory of recapitulation states that some portion of one's early infantile and childhood development gets played out again in a repetitive manner during adolescence. A closer analysis reveals how intimately wed is Freud's theory of adolescence to this notion of recapitulation.

Freud begins his essay on adolescence with the following words: “With the arrival of puberty, changes set in which are destined to give infantile sexual life its final, normal shape” (1905, p. 207). The psychological processes of puberty are rooted in the maturation of the sexual instinct. In describing the nature of transformation in puberty, Freud states:

The sexual instinct has hitherto been predominantly auto-erotic; it now finds a sexual object. Its activity has hitherto been derived from a number of separate instincts and erotogenic zones, which independently of one another, have pursued a certain sort of pleasure as their sole sexual aim. Now, however, a new sexual aim appears, and all the component instincts combine to attain it, while the erotogenic zones become subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone.

(ibid.)

A child's sexual life, vis-à-vis the Oedipus or Electra complex, reaches a first climax in the third to fifth year. Freud describes this as a pre-genital organization of libido, where each separate instinct pursues its own acquisition of pleasure, independent of all the rest. The theoretical conundrum plaguing Freud went something like this: How does the polymorphously perverse child transform into an adult with a fixed and stable sexual identity where the genitals now have primacy among all other zones as the source of pleasure, thus insuring that the sexual instinct is in the service of reproduction? Adolescence becomes very crucial in this scheme, for one of its main goals as a discrete developmental period is to bring about the realization of this new sexual aim, which Freud describes as

the appropriate stimulation of an erotogenic zone (the genital zone itself, in the glans penis) by the appropriate object (the mucous membrane of the vagina); and from the pleasure yielded by this excitation the motor energy is obtained, this time by a reflex path, which brings about the discharge of the sexual substance. This last pleasure is the highest in intensity and its mechanism differs from that of the earlier phase.

(ibid., p. 210)

This high intensity pleasure, which we call orgasm, Freud objectively terms “end-pleasure.” It results in a phase in which the tension of libido is extinguished. He distinguishes this from “fore-pleasure,” which occurs in infancy and latency and comes about through the stimulation of an erotogenic zone (for example, mother caressing an infant's skin). He states:

If at any point in the sexual process, the fore-pleasure turns out to be too great and the element of the tension too small, the motive for proceeding with the sexual act is abandoned.

(ibid., p. 211)

He goes on to say:

Experience has shown that the precondition for this damaging event is that the erotogenic zone concerned or the corresponding component instinct shall already during childhood have contributed an unusual amount of pleasure.

(ibid.)

On account of this logic, when the transformations of puberty get stuck or fixated, one looks to the cause of that fixation in childhood. The most conspicuous example of this mode of thought can be found in Freud's description of the pubertal processes of young women. There are many powerful and compelling critiques by a host of feminist writers of the grave misconceptions Freud perpetuates in his understanding of women's sexual and emotional development during puberty.¹ In light of these critiques, I review the theory here with the sole purpose of showing how completely Freud was gripped by the idea of adolescence as recapitulation.

According to Freud, little girls experience fore-pleasure through the discharge of sexual excitement in the spasms of the clitoris. During puberty, this sexual excitement is severely repressed. A young woman goes through a period when she is anesthetic, that is, she holds back and denies her sexuality; the excitability of the clitoris, what Freud refers to as her “childish masculinity,” is extinguished. This period of dormancy allows the leading erotogenic zone to transfer from the clitoris to the vagina. The transfer culminates when a young woman's sexuality locates itself in the passivity of the vaginal orifice; it is only then that Freud considers her to be sexually mature. He goes on to state:

This anaesthesia may become permanent if the clitoridal zone refuses to abandon its excitability, an event for which the way is prepared precisely by an extensive activity of that zone in childhood.

(ibid., p. 221)

In both cases, for boys and for girls, too much stimulation and pleasure from an erotogenic zone during childhood results in a fixity of development during puberty. Childish pleasures refusing to release their hold on the developing adolescent cause a failure in the maturation of the sexual instinct. That sexual maturation in puberty is determined by early childhood sexuality is reiterated by Freud when he states: “It is only at puberty that the sexual instincts develop to their full intensity; but the direction of the development, as well as all the predispositions for it, have already been determined by the early efflorescence of sexuality during childhood which preceded it” (1923, p. 246).

After eroticism is brought into the service of reproduction, Freud views the second major transformation of puberty, on the psychological side, as the process of finding an appropriate sexual object to fulfill the aim of genital maturity. Freud links sexual satisfaction in an infant with the taking of nourishment. In this schema, the infant's sexual instinct has an object outside of herself, that is, the mother's breast. As the infant begins to recognize that she is separate from mother, the search for an object turns inward and becomes auto-erotic. At puberty, this originary search for an object outside oneself takes its shape in the adolescent's striving for a heterosexual love relationship. A child nursing at its mother's breast is Freud's prototype for every subsequent love relationship.

Although in latency a barrier is erected against incest, the immensely powerful physical and psychological transformations of puberty re-animate the incestuous strivings of the individual, although now in the form of fantasy ideas. In these unconscious fantasies, infantile tendencies emerge in combination with the sexually maturing body and the adolescent is attracted to the opposite-sex parent in accord with their oedipal strivings. Although they are mitigated by the incest taboo, these fantasies now become the basis of the “affectionate current” of sexual life in adolescence.

Here recapitulation bears itself out again. The fantasies of the pubertal period originate in the infantile sexual researches that were abandoned in childhood, that is, those initial attempts of children to discover the nature of sexuality and their own sexual constitution. Freud states:

Some among the sexual phantasies of the pubertal period are especially prominent, and are distinguished by their very general occurrence and by being to a great extent independent of individual experience. Such are the adolescent's phantasies of overhearing his parents in sexual intercourse, of having been seduced at an early age by someone he loves and of having been threatened with castration; such, too, are his phantasies of being in the womb, and even of experiences there, and the so-called “Family Romance,” in which he reacts to the difference between his attitude towards his parents now and in his childhood.

(1905, p. 226)

Although the Oedipus complex peaks in infantile sexuality, it nonetheless exercises a decisive role on the sexuality of adults through its after-effects. The origin of these after-effects occurs in the intensity with which the Oedipus complex penetrates the heart of puberty. For Freud, the repudiation of incestuous phantasies is the most significant, painful and difficult psychological achievement of this time of life. It is the essence of the pubertal process.

A child's affection for its parents is the most important infantile trace that gets revived in puberty. A young man or woman falling in love for the first time chooses a person who re-animates the image of mother or father. Object choice in puberty is then ultimately based on these childhood prototypes. Freud states this unequivocally:

The innumerable peculiarities of the erotic life of human beings as well as the compulsive character of the process of falling in love itself are quite unintelligible except by reference back to childhood and as being residual effects of childhood.

(ibid., p. 229)

Freud's seed ideas of the nature of adolescence as recapitulation sprouted in the theories of four major psychoanalysts.

ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY: ERNEST JONES' CONTRIBUTION TO THE PSYCHOANALYTIC UNDERSTANDING OF ADOLESCENCE

Jones (1922), in his paper, “Some Problems of Adolescence,” takes up themes that directly touch upon Freud's theory of recapitulation. He begins by looking at the differences between children and adults and ponders the remarkable changes that happen between these two developmental periods. He then turns his attention toward adolescence to give his account of this transitional period of life. He states:

Before these important changes can be brought about, the transitional stage of adolescence has to be passed through, and this is effected in a highly interesting manner. At puberty, a regression takes place in the direction of infancy, of the first period of all, and the person lives over again, though on another plane, the development he passed through in the first five years of life…. Put it another way, it signifies that the individual recapitulates and expands in the second decennium of life the development he passed through during the first five years of life, just as he recapitulates during these first five years the experiences of thousands of years in his ancestry and during the pre-natal period those of million of years.

(ibid., pp. 39–40)

For Jones, then, there is something astonishingly similar between the first five years of life (which he is here referring to as infancy) and the adolescent years. Overwhelming emotional experiences distinguish both periods, which leads Jones to characterize them as the most passionate ages of human being. He then goes on to outline with great specificity what he sees as the analogies between these two periods of development.

Both infancy and adolescence depend on a heightened capacity for tolerating stimulation and inhibiting response. For example, a central task of infancy is the acquirement of control over the acts of excretion. Analogously, a central task of adolescence is the acquirement of self-control. Repression is also crucial in both periods. In infancy, the psyche is being readied for the eventual forgetting of the important events of these first five years. For adolescents, ideas tolerable before puberty—for example, the desire for the pleasure of parental caresses—now becomes repressed.

For both small children and adolescents, altruism and an interest in the outer world come about as libidinal attachments extend away from the self toward outside objects. Both infancy and adolescence have this quality of an initial pre-occupation with the self that later is transformed to an interest in and engagement with the world.

Finally, adolescent dependency is analogous to the need for love characteristic of the oedipal phase of infancy. For example, a young man's feeling of rivalry with his father in adolescence is explained by a regression to a prior oedipal relationship. The defensive nature of his constant rejection of the caresses and intimacies of his mother is explained in terms of fighting off a regressive pull to an earlier period of closeness.

What does Jones mean when he asserts that an adolescent lives over again on another plane the development he passed through in the first five years of life? How is he thinking of the nature of recapitulation? Here, we witness a literal rendering of Freud's idea that an individual going through puberty gets fixated at a certain psychosexual stage both in terms of object choice and physiological development, depending on how he passed through this stage as a child.

Jones states:

That the autoerotic phases belong to the earlier stage of adolescence rather than the later is familiar enough knowledge. With it goes the tendency to introversion and a richer life of secret phantasy, together with the greater preoccupation with the self and the varying degrees of shyness and self-consciousness, which are so often prominent features during adolescence. The anal-sadistic phases varies in intensity, but it is characteristic enough for the nice gentle lad of ten to change into the rough and untidy boy of thirteen, to the great distress of his female relatives; extravagance, procrastination, obstinacy, passion for collecting, and other traits of anal-erotic origin ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical perspectives on adolescence
• Part II Adolescence, initiation, and the dying process
• Part III Jung and adolescence: a new synthesis
• Part IV Adolescent psychotherapy: shifting the paradigm
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index