Trauma, Adolescent Transformation, and Parenthood

The developmental task to accept one's inborn mortality and thereby to propel one's procreative strivings cannot be mastered before adolescence when the transforming person is crossing the border between childhood and adulthood. The difficulties to integrate infanticidal/destructive strivings into life supporting needs in adolescence as a precondition for well caring parenthood often appear to be due to defenses against remembering traumatic experiences. These developmental concepts will be exemplified by vignettes from the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of an emerging young adult woman and mother of a most difficult baby.