Continuing the previous Post, during puberty, pre-adolescents get strongly close, supporting each other, once they know how it is like to feel that awkward and unkown experiences. It is a period of great intensity, confidence and of idealization. Privacy and complicity with friends of the same age and sex emerge as an urgent need. The “great need” is to find people who can understand what and how they feel, in first person, i.e, people who mirror their feelings and behaviors and people who work as aspirations models of how to feel and behave. By that time, His/Her Majesties, “mom and dad”, fall off their thrones and are replaced by other identity models from pubers’ socila environment: teachers, pop stars, celebrities, etc. It is the beginning of the transition from childhood to adulthood. It is also time to get over moral binarism that describes children’s world- yes or no; black or white; right or wrong, mean or good. Their psychological safety is in check. Meanwhile, an intelectual leap happens due to other change coming from the hardware: logical reasoning expantion. The new psyche’s condition could be expressed in the duet: sexual energy arousal and sofistication of arguing abilities. As a result, teenagers start to get in touch with moral and affective ambiguities. P.A’s[1] strong thesis is that sexual energy at the root of puber’s emotional discomfort and anxieties, to some extent. Children’s esthetic and moral worlds, their psychological ground, don’t fit anymore and anguish, linked to intuive search (present in early years) is activated once again. Children’s emotional balance falls apart. During childhood, belonging is taken for granted: it comes from school, clubs, in short, places that are part of their lives, often chosen by parents/caregivers. This is how the world is. Puberty demands, most of the time, hard adaptation, because the ex-child doesn’t have references of how to feel and behave in those new conditions. Sexual energy emerges with unprecedented strenght. Considering that development always happens in a cultural context, adolescence is a time when pubers face a double challenge, i.e, they are not only supposed to deal with sexual energy, but also with the transition to a personal life project. It is also time to abandon children’s identity references and embrace new challeging ones. This is what it is like to be a normal teenager. The new psychological condition comes togehter with a new anguish:
existential anguish.
To be continued in the next Post [1] P.A are the initials for Psychodramatic Analyisis, our main methodological reference
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