Adults who look after adolescents have both to want them to behave badly, and to try and
stop them; and to be able to do this the adults have to enjoy having 'hooky' minds themselves.
They have to believe that truancy is good and that the rules are good. ‘The most beautiful thing
in the world,’ Robert Frost wrote in his Notebooks, ‘is conflicting interests when both are good.’
Someone with a truant mind believes that conflict is the point, not the problem. The job of the 'hooky' mind is to keep conflict as alive as possible, which means that adolescents are free to be adolescent only if adults are free to be adults. The real problems turn up when one or other
side is determined to resolve the conflict: when adolescents are allowed to live in a world
of pure impulse, or adults need them to live in a world of incontestable law. In this sense
therapy for adolescents should be about creating problems – or clarifying what they really
are – and not about solving them.
A truant mind has to have something to truant from and something to truant for.
The adults provide something to truant from and the adolescents have to discover something to truant for.
In straightforward psychoanalytic terms, adolescents truant from parents as forbidden objects of desire, as the people who have deprived them; they truant for accessible objects of desire, for the possibility of making up for the inevitable deprivations they have suffered growing up with their parents, for the 'fun' 'escape' the parents can’t provide.
Truanting has something utopian about it. The truant mind matters because it is the part
of ourselves that always wants something better; and it also needs to come up against
resistance to ensure that the something better is real, not merely a fantasy. In our dreams, Anna Freud said, we can have our eggs cooked exactly as we want them, but we can’t eat them. In reality, we can eat our eggs because they are not cooked exactly as we want them. Truant minds need to keep on being reminded that there is nothing more disappointing than getting exactly what you wanted.
Psychoanalysis has had a lot of stories to tell about truant minds; indeed it is these that psychoanalysis has attempted both to rein in, and to sponsor and celebrate.
When Freud said that the rider has to guide the horse in the direction the horse wants to go
in, or that the ego was not master in its own house, or talked of unconscious slips or of
human beings as ambivalent animals, he was describing modern people as being riven with intentions and counter-intentions. For Freud, it was not that there were truant minds,
but that the mind was inherently truant.
stop them; and to be able to do this the adults have to enjoy having 'hooky' minds themselves.
They have to believe that truancy is good and that the rules are good. ‘The most beautiful thing
in the world,’ Robert Frost wrote in his Notebooks, ‘is conflicting interests when both are good.’
Someone with a truant mind believes that conflict is the point, not the problem. The job of the 'hooky' mind is to keep conflict as alive as possible, which means that adolescents are free to be adolescent only if adults are free to be adults. The real problems turn up when one or other
side is determined to resolve the conflict: when adolescents are allowed to live in a world
of pure impulse, or adults need them to live in a world of incontestable law. In this sense
therapy for adolescents should be about creating problems – or clarifying what they really
are – and not about solving them.
A truant mind has to have something to truant from and something to truant for.
The adults provide something to truant from and the adolescents have to discover something to truant for.
In straightforward psychoanalytic terms, adolescents truant from parents as forbidden objects of desire, as the people who have deprived them; they truant for accessible objects of desire, for the possibility of making up for the inevitable deprivations they have suffered growing up with their parents, for the 'fun' 'escape' the parents can’t provide.
Truanting has something utopian about it. The truant mind matters because it is the part
of ourselves that always wants something better; and it also needs to come up against
resistance to ensure that the something better is real, not merely a fantasy. In our dreams, Anna Freud said, we can have our eggs cooked exactly as we want them, but we can’t eat them. In reality, we can eat our eggs because they are not cooked exactly as we want them. Truant minds need to keep on being reminded that there is nothing more disappointing than getting exactly what you wanted.
Psychoanalysis has had a lot of stories to tell about truant minds; indeed it is these that psychoanalysis has attempted both to rein in, and to sponsor and celebrate.
When Freud said that the rider has to guide the horse in the direction the horse wants to go
in, or that the ego was not master in its own house, or talked of unconscious slips or of
human beings as ambivalent animals, he was describing modern people as being riven with intentions and counter-intentions. For Freud, it was not that there were truant minds,
but that the mind was inherently truant.
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