ABSTRACT
Bodily changes are subject neither to a person’s will nor their control, erupting and eliciting fiery emotions in the adolescent. In this chapter, the author turns in more detail to physical alterations not forgetting that both the secretion of hormones and attendant physical changes will awaken and intensify emotional and mental conflicts. The gaze and attempted contact are no longer possible; the child is left to its own devices and must hold itself emotionally, which it attempts to do through a pseudo-independence and premature maturity. In all phases of puberty, the body also becomes a medium for protest, provocation and propaganda. Attendant insecurity and shame is often turned outwards in the form of provocation, reversed into the opposite pole: instead of a transformed but concealed body, the body becomes an agent for protest in conscious contrast to more adult modes of presentation.
