| Adolescence |
| by Stan Persky | |
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While I was an adolescent, everything that is crucial to my identity happened. Because those adolescent experiences were so vivid, I could never accept the notions of the determining impact of the unconscious or the affective power of early childhood traumas with any enthusiasm. So, I'm not a Freudian even though it was the reigning psychological ideology during the 1950s. The general ideas of Freud are plausible in the abstract if not in the specifics, but I remain deeply resistant to the idea that we are primarily shaped by our infantile experiences. Adolescence as the determining period in the creation of the self seems more common-sensically true. As an adolescent, my relationships with the boys with whom I played sandlot baseball and went to Marshall, and then Austin High School in Chicago--the Murphy brothers, Eddie Lacy, Bob Greenspan, Abe Dorevich, Nick Kinnis, Mel Weisberg--set the parameters of my notions of friendship, loyalty, physical beauty and desire. Adolescence is when I first contemplated the nature of the starry universe; became engrossed in politics (the McCarthy-Army U.S. Senate hearings on communism, which I watched on TV after school); and acquired a taste for "bohemian" company--in drama class with Sandra S., "Bunny," Chuck Harris. It's also when I began to write. One day, age thirteen or so, I was working--inkily and ineptly--in the school mimeograph room with Bob Perna, a local "tough" of Mediterranean lineage. He told me about an uncle of his who was an artist. I looked up blankly from the clicking drum of the mimeo and registered his disappointment when I failed to recognize the name of his relative, Salvador Dali, or the remarkableness of being so related. After all, I was supposed to be a "brain." I was awed by Perna's sophistication, his assumption that one should surely know who Dali was, by the intimation that a larger world existed and could be the concern of people like me. Now that I'm sixty, I still often encounter situations in life through the experiential grid built when I was a teenager. If this is "arrested development," as the Freudians of my youth would have had it, then so be it. |
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