Even granting Freud’s questionable assumption that fantasy might reach its peak during adolescence, it can hardly be said to begin with puberty.1 Though new contents and new issues are posed by entry into adolescence, in the evolution of fantasy, as in most aspects of human existence, there are powerful strains toward the preservation of continuities. Newly sexualized fantasies undoubtedly reach out and incorporate materials from prior and current nonsexual (or presexual) fantasies. Many of these desires may claim a kind of seniority, with origins in early childhood, and the most significant are themselves layered by residues of intervening uses and pleasures.
Latency, virtually all now agree, is not a period during which the sexual conveniently lies dormant, but is one in which an increasing store of sexual meanings and social uses is accumulated and refined. Of particular significance will be the continuing encounters and experiments with gender commitments, which will constitute most of the framework for subsequent sexual consolidations (Sarnoff 1976; Thorne and Luria 1986). As a result, there is an increase in the amount of dialogue in requisite internal rehearsals, rehearsals undertaken with increasing skill and self-consciousness, even if this training is unevenly manifested in overt behaviors. The self must be explained to the self more often than before. These explanations require the self of others to be explained as well. The adolescent is also expected to enact many of the dramas of life with more coherence than before. The bland language of development disguises what are often experienced as difficult, sometimes precarious, sometimes terrifying accomplishments.
A common diagnosis of the “normal” problems associated with the experience of adolescence in contemporary North America is the relative absence of formal rites of passage, rites that might give recognition to a critical transformation of status in ways that affirm the solidarity of the larger community as such and with the adolescent. However, given the unevenness and irregularity with which adolescence is experienced and the profound uncertainty surrounding its conclusion, a more self-focused exercise in managing an increasingly diversified holding of commitments and pieties may better prepare the adolescent for the decentering qualities common to postmodern social landscapes. Where public rites of passage enhance social solidarity, the skills of scripting and re-scripting models of behavior acquired in producing fantasies serve to enhance the development of effective rituals of self-solidarity.
Prevailing cultural scenarios dealing with the sexual undoubtedly introduce new settings, characters, and gestures, though many of these will not be totally new to most adolescents. The potential sexual implications of what were previously experienced as nonsexual scenarios also tend to become more visible. This greater visibility involves not merely the direct and indirect re-creation of the wishes of remote childhood infused with the powers of newly eroticized images, but the restaging of the fantasies reflective of current aspirations and current frustrations. For example, students learn to add strategies for handling the enlarged category of extrafamilial authority figures, such as teachers. This learning in turn shapes images and uses of parental figures just as parental images inf use attitudes toward other authority figures.
The predominant cultural scenarios newly available to adolescents are those involving adults or near-adults engaging in adult behavior. Even those rare instances that acknowledge that adolescents are engaged in explicitly sexual behavior are strongly colored with the proto-adult character of the moment. However, the continuing expansion of the youth market, as constituted by the enormity of youth audiences as well as the marketing of images of the young to audiences of those no longer young, may be altering distinctions between the preadult and the fully adult rather rapidly. Definition of age-status distinctions becomes increasingly unclear, with a lack of clarity that extends to generational distinctions.
What have been termed oedipal issues, as a result, do not disappear but must be played out in a more chaotic field with previously unseen overlaps and crossgenerational parallels. It is questionable whether the adult figures in this fantasied realm are, as conventional Freudian theory would have it, direct representations of parents or fed by experiences of witnessing “the primal scene” (Kaplan 1988). If, in fact, parental identifications are implicit in eroticized images of self and other(s), they must compete for inclusion with other equally competitive sources in the rich imagery of the cultural media and those valorized by proximate peer culture. Where parental figures play significant roles in evolving erotic capacities, their most significant role may be as an occasion for
elaborating capacities for constructing images that either exclude or disguise direct references to them.
Adolescents commonly experience new and sometimes conflicting demands and desires, but also demands and desires with new and sometimes conflicting claims upon the loyalties of the past or the promises of the future. The purchase price of a promised future is often an undisguisable disloyalty to earlier commitments—disloyalty to friends, toys, and sacred promises made previously by the self to the self. This sacrifice of the past is particularly endemic in future — oriented modern societies, where a future is promised with urgency but with few specified details and those rarely guaranteed. Desires, both old and new, become capital to be used in bargaining with and for the future. Despite the assumption of most psychoanalytic theory that the major task of adolescence is to “divest pregenital drives of their independent aims and progressively subjugate them to genitality” (Blos 1962:160), the most substantial pre-latency legacies are probably those which in muted form continue to influence the fantasies of later childhood. Moreover, it is likely that the staging of the sexual fantasy focuses upon narrative fragments that endow genitality with social and psychological significance rather than the relatively inarticulate fact of genitality itself.
The residuum of such sexual fantasy materials plays a critical role in the sexual scripts employed during adult years. This later use of fantasy materials may flow from the capacity of all stages of postpubertal life to generate the risks of both imposing and being subjected to injury, humiliation, and violation with their corresponding dreams of survival and retaliation. Additionally, this original legacy of sexual fantasy constitutes a repertoire of intrapsychic sexual drama capable of sustaining excitement within the security and predictability of behaviors embedded within the interpersonal routines of everyday life (Stoller 1985a).
The sexualization of desire, which cannot be taken for granted, involves the establishment of links between definitions of the situation and sexual response, a process through which the actor experiencing desire either initiates the direct beginnings of sexual excitement or initiates or tries to initiate an explicit exclusion of sexual excitement. Sustained excitement typically requires a reordering of identity themes describing self and other. It requires not only the establishment of positive presences but positive absences as well. Some aspects of self or other must be there; others must just as insistently not be present in recognizable form. Sexual scripts, both intrapsychic and interpersonal, emerge to transform a complex evolved negotiation into what appears as only minimally self-reflexive behavior. There are obvious parallels with Stoller’s useful concept of “the microdot”, which assumes that sexual excitement is sustained when the actor can perceive the other as possessing some attribute or combination of attributes that functions as a metonymic reduction of a complex narrative of justifications, potentially containing other microdots or micro-microdots.
Sexual excitement is a microdot. Microdots are fantasies; the term “microdot” is useful because it suggests certain functions and purposes of fantasies, efficiency above all. “Microdot”, more than “fantasy”, implies all at the same instance; an ability to condense masses of data; to be retrieved instantly into consciousness for actions, affects, and inspiration; to be moved around weightlessly and slipped into situations in which it brings about desired results. It is efficient. But the conscious experience of instantaneousness hides logical, motivated (even if unconscious) planning.
(Stoller 1979:166)