Die Auswirkungen der Wende 1989 auf Adoleszente

The significance of adolescence for psychosocial development is a controversial theme with discussions ranging from an emphasis on the importance of early childhood to the ideas propagated by Freud that the dynamics of adolescence play an important role in the psychological development of the individual and transculturation. The course of adolescence provides a starting point for understanding the psychodynamics of patients, which is often given insufficient consideration. Today, it can repeatedly be seen that patients in their mid-thirties are coming for treatment: patients who experienced their adolescence during the period of political upheaval in Germany. For a variety of reasons this proves to have been a vulnerable life phase, above all for East Germans. Puberty and adolescence comprise developmental tasks whose completion in a crisis situation, such as represented by the political change in East Germany with the reunification process, suffered considerably. Accordingly, the consequences of this conflict-laden coping process can be revealed during later therapy in transference and central relationship conflicts. The adolescents made considerable efforts to adapt to the new conditions, however, without adolescent altercations with GDR parents and conditions having taken place in sufficient measure. The treatment of a female patient is presented for whom the political change during adolescence proved to be a critical life event. Her narcissistic deficits together with her fragile identity were exacerbated as a result of the social upheavals. It is demonstrated how this ??critical life event?? was intertwined with her earlier psychological structure, the problems of adolescence and her search for identity during the course of psychoanalysis.