THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 38:15-18 (1978)

DISCUSSION OF "ADOLESCENT WRITINGS"

Leland van den Daele

The paper, "Adolescent Writings and Idealized Image," provides both clinical and theoretical formulations whose implications for development possess considerable importance to the extension of Homey theory. With the exception of occasional contributions by Bernard Zuger, Muriel Ivemy, Nor- man Kelman, Elizabeth Kilpatrick, Martin Symmonds, and, of course those observations contributed by Homey, the area of development remains, to this day, relatively unexplored within the Homey paradigm. Since human beings occur not only as adults, but as adolescents, children, and infants as well, this lacunae in Homey theory invites the general criticism, often leveled by adherents to other schools of psychoanalysis, of an inherent incompleteness in Homey theory. For these reasons, I welcome the contribution by Dr. Tershakovec not only for its content, but also its intent.

In his paper, Dr. Tershakovec suggests that the formation of the idealized image occurs with the consolidation of formal operational thinking during the period of middle and late adolescence. This is a fortuitous observation inas- much as cognitive developmental theorists, and Piaget in particular, have concerned themselves with the ramifications of formal operational thinking in the organization of adolescent preoccupations and behavior.

In the remarks that follow, I will draw upon the work of Jean Piaget, whose current impact upon developmental psychology and psychology in general cannot be overestimated. In contrast to psychoanalytic theories of develop- ment that are largely retrospective and reconstructive, developmental psy- chological theories are based primarily upon contemporaneous observation or experiment. Since reconstructive analyses are an effort to represent what was once contemporaneous, contemporaneous observation is clearly a valu- able adjunct to psychoanalytic theory, and, as we will see, the observations of cognitive developmental psychology are highly congruent with Homey theory.

In Piaget's theory, the period of adolescence ushers in formal operational thought, which in contrast to the child's mode of thinking is "both thinking about thought and a reversal of relations between what is real and what is possible. ''1 As a consequence, the adolescent is both reflective and able to

Leland van den Daele, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.

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escape the concrete present toward the realm of the abstract and hypotheti- cal.

Adolescence is not only a period of transformation of thought, but also the period of assumption of adult roles. The interaction of these events, one internal and provoked through maturation and experience, and the other external and mandated by social expectation, eventuates in the adolescent construction of a "life program" as well as a plethora of various social, political, scientific, and religious theories• As Piaget observes about French students between the ages of 14 and 19 years:

Most of them have political or social theories and want to reform the world; they have all their own ways of explaining all of the present day turmoil of collective life. • . . Philosophical speculation carries away a minority and for any true intellectual, adolescence is the metaphysical age par excellence, an age whose dangerous seduction is forgotten only with difficulty at the adult level . . . . Some write down their ideas, and it is extremely interesting to see the outlines which are taken up and filled in later life. 1

The adolescent penchant for cognitive abstraction, idealization, and systemi- zation and his faith in his newly acquired operational competence causes him to ignore the merely empirical and ignore the viscissitudes of a recalcitrant reality. In the true sense, the adolescent is egocentric, that is, centered upon his own ego. In the work of G. Dumas, cited by Inhelder and Piaget, adoles- cent recitation of evening reveries revealed, "fantasies and fabulations which several years later would have appeared in their own eyes as signs of patho- logical megalomania. ''1 These fantasy constructions often involved copious adolescent writings, which included secret novels, partially completed theo- retical treatises presuming to reconcile science and religion, first scenes of first acts of abandoned plays, and so on. Far from being the exception, at least among middle and upper-middle class Swiss adolescents, these endeavors appeared to be the rule. In American and among the European working class, these projects differ in content, but not in form, with the common denomi- nator of the "as if" quality of constructions.

Inherent in these constructions is a typically schematic view of a complex social and material reality, but no matter; if reality does not conform it should conform, itought obey. And since all things are possible in the imagination, possibilities become realities, and probabilities, actualities. In Homey terms the whole apparatus of claims and shoulds is engaged to maintain the ide- alization. This idealization is not merely of abstract significance but deeply personal. As Piaget writes, "The adolescent goes through a phase in which he attributes an unlimited power to his own thoughts so that the dream of a

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glorious future or of transforming the world through ideas seems to him not only fantasy but also an effective action which in itself modifies the empirical world."1

The parallelism between Piaget's and Horney's observations on the search for glory, the idealized image, and the operation of shoulds and claims, although rendered in different nomenclature, is striking. And this parallelism extends to an emphasis in both Piaget and Homey upon "corrective experi- ence" as an antidote to neurotic confabulations. From Piaget's point of view, adolescent constructions are tested against the points of view of others, and through discussion and sometimes impassioned argumentation, the adoles- cent discovers how fragile his constructions really are. But for Piaget, the true decentering of adolescent egocentrism occurs in "the entrance into the occupational world . . . . The adolescent becomes an adult when he under- takes a real job...,,1 And so also in Homey, the neurotic progresses as he makes contact with his real self in a real world of real people.

Wliat then differentiates neurotic from healthy development if both traverse a parallel course? This question is not considered by Piaget for his concern is "normal" development to the exclusion of other variants. Where Piaget ends, Horney begins, and it is in her various clinical theoretical contributions, Our Inner Conflicts, and Neurosis and Human Growth, that the continued history of adolescent constructions are traced in neurotic thought, feeling, and be- havior.

So far I have discussed in a far too summary manner some of the theoretical correspondences of Karen Homey and Jean Piaget. This discussion, however, would be incomplete if I not amplify some of the implications for these correspondences for clinical practice and in particular in relation to adoles- cent writings.

Above all, an adolescent solution is a solution that relates to self-identity and, however expressed, the relation of the self to the world. The adolescent solution is a solution precisely because it effects an integration of hitherto fragmented elements of experience and feeling. That the solution may be unrealistic, contrived, or a melting of opposites is not at issue. Given the experience and contemporaneous conditions of the adolescent, it is the best he could do. What is crucial in this formulation is that the adolescent solution contains within it preciselythose elements and conflicts which precipitated it. Thus, the adolescent solution, to paraphrase Freud, is a kind of royal road to the unconscious.

A 28-year-old patient of mine whose primary complaint is an inability to establish close and lasting ties with men reported a poem she had written in adolescence. The report occurred spontaneously in the context of her descrip- tion of her feelings about sexuality. The poem had four discrete sections, in

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the manner of an epoch poem: in the first section, the patient's sister was a Greek Goddess and the patient was the worshiper. In the second section, the patient had failed to gain the goddess' favor, so the patient was scolded, then discarded. In the third section, the patient is lost between life and death, like "Orpheus and Eurydice." And finally, in the fourth section, the patient is transformed into a "cockroach which sits upon a diamond."

When the patient was 14, her 19-year-old sister moved away from home, and the patient was left with two neurotic, perhaps borderline parents who alternately ignored and reprimanded her. Prior to the move, the patient's sister had been her primary caretaker, to whom the patient was deeply attached, although that attachment was largely unacknowledged until a few sessions before the reported poem.

The poem, brief as it is, reveals in unambiguous terms the patient's idealiza- tion of her sister, her sexualization of that relationship, her feelings of aban- donment connected with her presumed failure to gain favor, her abject self-effacement and extreme resignation romanticized in an image from classical mythology, and finally her deeply entrenched self-contempt.

While in this brief paper, I do not wish to dwell at length upon the correspondences between the patient's poem and her current life situation, let me say simply that her self-effacement and resignation characterize her dominant solution. She is ambivalent in her friendships with both males and females, alternatively submissive and indirectly competitive, while her sexual relations are brief encounters followed by feelings of unreality and self- recrimination for imagined inadequacies.

This example and the example of Mary provide prima facie evidence of the connection and consistency of the adolescent solution into adulthood. In clinical practice the resurrection of this solution from memory or through documents like adolescent writings provides not only potential access to unacknowledged needs and desires, but also access to the deepest layers of personal conflict.

References

1. Inhelder, B. & Piaget, J. The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books, 1958.