Unremembered youth
INTRODUCTION
Adolescence, a concept just a century old, encompasses dramatic variations across time and cultures at almost every level of application. Adolescence locates an age group at the margins of formal power in ways that legitimate the creation of a special social status. Like many social science concepts, adolescence can be assumed to be tainted by its past and present uses in ongoing discourses of discipline and control. Even those events or developments that offer the appearance of being controlled by the biological organism, such as gender, ejaculatory competence, or the onset of menstruation, must yield a substantial measure of their claims to the transforming powers of the cultural scripting of interpersonal contexts (Bourdieu 1993).
The concept of adolescence involves numerous potential users who are represented by distinct constituencies or markets for the employment of specific versions of the concept. Among the most visible of such constituencies are the various professionals who specialize in the production and commodification of knowledge and wisdom regarding adolescents. Another constituency is composed of those who in varying guises are involved in the parenting or supervision of adolescents, who in both pain and confusion often look to professionals for guidance and legitimacy. Not least are those who market services and goods to adolescents. An additional constituency consists of those who are variously subjected to versions of the concept. Use of the concept so thoroughly permeates social life that it is not surprising that many adolescents become adept at utilizing competing versions of what offers to represent them to defend themselves, not least from themselves. Still another constituency consists of those of us who have been adolescents, who often still struggle with the consequences of our experiences, and who, for the most part, still wait for some language with which and against which we might find some access to the adolescents we were and to a deeper sense of the legacies of that experience.
It is as a member of the first and last of these constituencies that I write this chapter. Much of the abundant literature on adolescence and youth leaves me feeling disconnected; it is as if I were being presented with a description of some
alien culture, not a description of something I was supposed to have been. This I am sure is due partly to the dramatic changes that have occurred at all stages of the life course during the past half century. Much of my sense of alienation, however, may also rest upon what is absent from the existing discourses surrounding the concept of adolescence. Among these absences is a fuller representation of the experience of adolescent psychosexual development. Adolescent sexuality, ironically, being an almost obsessive societal concern, appears in social science discourses in extremely abstract language. Its language migrates between an almost inarticulate behaviorism and quests for meaning that focus on origins of infancy or childhood or anticipations of adulthood and almost never deals with adolescence as a range of experiences in its own right. As a result, there are very few aspects of the human experience more dependent upon the enriched language of literary writing and pop culture for mirroring representations.
What I shall attempt to do is to focus upon psychosexual development as seen from a traditional psychoanalytic perspective and to engage it deconstructively. The result, the desired result, will be not a new coherent statement of what constitutes adolescent psychosexual development, but merely a heightened sense of what to look for when we think about the lives of specific adolescents in specific contexts.
For whatever reasons it has occurred, the current revival of interest in psychoanalytic thinking is clearly to be welcomed. I can think of no other conceptual approach that offers more by way of sensitizing us to the significance of intrapsychic life and its dependency upon, and the richness of its processing of, the symbolic. At the same time, one despairs of this revival as it gives a renewed prominence to the entire tradition and collection of practitioners who, at best, have only selectively reconsidered and revised basic theoretical assumptions that, like the concept of adolescence, are now almost a century old.
Underlying much psychoanalytic writing on adolescent sexuality is a utopian view of normality that must have excluded all but a minority who, by the very fact of being a minority, may be anything but normal. Such individuals, those achieving the traditional psychoanalytic definition of sexual normality or maturity, may instead be those who are vulnerable to many other kinds of problems. Most psychoanalytic commentators, despite their curious and curiously consistent absence of the most rudimentary empathic understanding of the broadest ranges of sexual experience, do not, I would guess, fall into this select, if suspect, category of normals. Most of them probably come closer to the more uneven and unresolved experiences of the sexual that describe most of us. This means that their ability to maintain this utopian view of what they presume to be the normal experience probably rests upon systematic repressions. And repression, as they have instructed us, not only is called forth to manage anxiety but also becomes a generator of its own and often a magnet for anxieties too embarrassed to speak in their own names.
Among the most original and enduring of the contributions of Sigmund Freud is the concept of infantile sexuality: the idea that sexuality does not begin, as much previous theory held, with the onset of puberty, but that it exists, if only in the most nascent forms, in the earliest experiences of the human. Moreover, according to Freud, most of what post-pubertal sexuality would subsequently become is given both shape (sexual object) and content (sexual aim) in the course of these early experiences.
The present chapter adopts an alternative approach to psychosexual development, one that more than questioning the concept of an innate sex drive, calls into question the concept of a distinct and intrinsically sexual form of desire. Rather, we might consider whether earlier theory may have been correct, even if for the wrong reason: that the desire for sexual experience is acquired—if you will, learned—and is served by, and at the service of, numerous emotions and different configurations of desire. And while the desires that ultimately are attached to the sexual may find their origins in the earliest experiences of the individual, linkage with the overtly sexual tends to occur for most, though surely not all, persons during their adolescent experiences and, for many, at even later ages.
This, it should be clear, is not to reject the idea that in some instances early experience has the capacity to narrowly restrict ultimate sexual outcomes, but merely to assert the possibility that for many, if not most, such restrictions of sexual outcomes are sufficiently permissive to make the specific and concrete issues of adolescence as significant in determining sexual outcomes as anything that may have previously occurred.1 And, moreover, even where early experience results in powerfully restricting psychological insistences, as may of ten be the case where larger issues such as gender identity are involved, postchildhood sexual outcomes will still be influenced by the contingencies of time and place, including available alternative constructions of the sexual, as well as available alternatives to the sexual. Sexual identity, while expressive of larger issues of personality or character, is also interactive with personality and character. Sexual identity is often the problematic of personality or character; rarely is it their preordained destiny.
While fully recognizing the substantially “overdetermined” character of psychosexual development, that is, the degree to which it is influenced by the totality of the individual’s history of development, I shall explore the possibility of an equally profound, if not more profound, “under-determination” or open — endedness of psychosexual development. I shall consider the degree to which it is influenced by the contingencies of the moment including the contingent factor of the legacies or residues of the developmental past (Castoriades 1987). What is often ignored is that the stability of the organization of the individual’s sexual identity, from adolescence on, may be as much in the hands of the individual’s unknown social destiny as it is in the hands of the actual history of the individual’s development. As the world around the individual changes or the role of the individual within the world unexpectedly changes, the entire ecology of the self may experience disturbances requiring reorganization, including disturbances and reorganizations of the sexual (Kohut 1978a). Such changes, which previously were viewed as changes on the part of the individual, an individual otherwise located in relatively stable social context, are increasingly experienced as reflecting a social world where organizational patterns, institutionalized expectations, and the lives of related others often change in rapid disorder (Simon et al. 1993).
I begin by examining Freud’s approach to psychosexual development, with a particular interest in his relative lack of concern for the sexual experiences of the adolescent. Our concern with Freud follows not only from the influential character of his approach to psychosexual development, but also from the broader pattern of his treatment of the adolescent experience. I shall then proceed to a consideration of the generally neglected, independent effects upon psychosexual development potentially associated with adolescence.
My primary emphasis will be upon the development of “sexual desire”, as distinct from “the desire for sex”. While these forms of desire are intimately related, they are far from identical. The latter refers to the desire for sexual behavior, which may be influenced by many kinds of desire, with intrinsically sexual desires, in some instances, playing only a minor, subordinate, and often merely facilitative role. Sexual desire, on the other hand, refers to the initiation and sustaining of sexual excitement, a condition that may, in many instances, be limited to the dimmest thresholds of consciousness (Stoller 1979). In other words, we must recognize that it is possible for there to be sexual behavior with little or no attending sexual excitement and that there may be intense levels of sexual excitement with little or no overtly sexual behavior.
We must also recognize that the explanation of either sexual desire or the desire for sex is rarely fully explanatory of the other. Sometimes sexual desires follow as a by-product of the tactics developed to satisfy still other desires, a situation where sexual desire or its simulacra must be self-consciously evoked. A concern with the desire for sex requires a history of the individual within social life; a concern with sexual desire requires a history of social life within the individual, or with that which places the sexual within the context of the whole person within an increasingly fragmented social world.