“Our fifteen year old son did a project on
newspapers at his school and this introduced him to the tabloid press with page
3 pinups. He has since brought The Sun home on several occasions. This has been
difficult as to my surprise my husband has looked at it with him, causing
embarrassment to our daughter of 16, especially as the pinups are only a couple
of years older than her. I would rather they looked at a magazine full of nudes
privately rather than round the breakfast table with the excuse that it is
“part of a family newspaper”. However, my husband says he wants our daughter to
feel sexuality is freer rather than hidden away and repressed as it was in his
home. I am undecided.”
Mrs
U.
As parents, we
have unlocked before us with each new developmental stage of our children some
conscious and unconscious memory of our own child selves. Adolescent children
in the family inevitably stir up memories and issues of sexuality. Awakened
memories are a source of richness and empathy when they help us understand what
our child is feeling. But what if those memories are not a source of richness
but of distress?
Those who have
experienced an adolescence in which sexuality was seen as something shameful
that should be hidden away may indeed wish to provide their own adolescent
children with a different environment. However, in choosing what seems to be an
opposite path you can end up in the same place. Mr and Mrs Y, for example, had
failed to see that forcing their teenage daughters to go on topless beaches was
as repressive as what they had experienced. It took Mrs Y. time to understand
that mocking her daughter for refusing to take off her bikini top mirrored
exactly her own mother’s mocking laugh when she was an adolescent shyly wearing
her first low-cut evening dress.
Mr U. finds it
hard to see that his teenage daughter is similarly oppressed by his public looking
at a young girl only a few years older than her within the context of a
domestic scene. Is he finding his daughter’s sexual growth threatening so that
publicly undressing her counterpart carries something punitive and controlling
towards her (that is also hostile to his wife) or is he trying to make a public
statement that he has no hidden sexual phantasies? Whatever Mr U.’s feelings,
there is no doubt that it is hard to be the parent of an adolescent.
Psychoanalyst
Dr. Michael Feldman describes the complex issues involved in any action a
parent takes (reference below). For example, a father might sit his daughter on
his knee knowing that it might stimulate her belief that they have an alliance
against the mother. However, not to take her on his knee because of that can
make the daughter feel rejected and perhaps give evidence of his unease about
the situation, confirming, in a different way, the child’s rivalrous
phantasies. Dr. Feldman shows how there is no way a parent can behave which
will not stimulate aggressive or sexual phantasies but that if the father and
mother are able to strive to develop the more mature aspects of their
relationship they will understand the dilemma of what their daughter needs and
not have to either deny or act out impulses from any member of the family.
To help their
children through this important stage Mr and Mrs U need to be as united as they
can. Sexual issues that get stirred up in adolescence can be so powerful that a
parent sometimes breaks away from adulthood in order to identify with an
excluded child. For example, Mrs B as an adolescent found it so intolerable
that her parents liked talking to each other, that as a mother she gave all her
time to her children. If her husband wanted any private discussion with her she
immediately identified with the excluded children and could not bear it. The
children, knowing they had been given the power to break up any parental
communication, grew more disturbed. Only when the couple were helped to see in
treatment how their behaviour, aimed at enriching their children, only deprived
them, could positive change happen.
What about the
son? At a time of physical and emotional change the newspaper project presented
him with a girl who could be looked at and possessed by him in shared phantasy
with his father. At issue here is not sexual curiosity or delight in physical
beauty but the nature of that shared look. Is he sharing because he is worried
his father will otherwise be angry he is growing up or is he, on the other
hand, provocatively taunting his father with his new-found feelings? Similarly,
what mixture of phantasies are behind a teenage girl displaying herself in this
way?
The fact that a
family paper contains a topless pin-up means that the issue of sexuality is
quite literally “ on the table”. Its popularity owes something to the desire of
families to deal publicly with a difficult subject. Sadly, however, dealing so
literally with a complex issue provides no resolution at all and in fact
creates further problems. Beverly Loughlin, former convenor of the Tavistock
Clinic Child Sexual Abuse Workshop puts it, “Children, for all their attacks on
it, want the primal scene to be private. When parental sexuality is not private
it is disturbing”. Equally, when adolescent sexuality is not private it is
similarly disturbing to the family. Privacy necessarily involves exclusion and
that is difficult to come to terms with.
“The Oedipus
Complex Today”, ed. John Steiner, Karnac Books, 1989 ś 7.(Includes chapter by
Dr.Feldman).
“Marriage Inside
Out”, Janet Mattinson & Christopher Clulow, Penguin, ś 4.99p.