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Adolescence is a time of self-doubt. The child is looking for a self-image that will satisfy him and give him narcissistic support. He finds this image in his best friend, child psychologist Marcel Rufo is sure.
The best friend is the one on whom you can project all those imaginary ideal qualities that a teenager would like to have. That is why the best friend never has flaws, this is a perfect being, who in response considers us to be perfection, because he also ascribes to us those properties that he himself would dream of possessing. “Because it was him, because it was me,” Montaigne said about his friend Boethius, and this phrase in our case gets another meaning: he is me, I am what I could be in my imagination . Ultimately, the real best friend is myself, and the other is nothing more than a substitute for me, a skeleton that we bring to life by trying on it our ideas, our desire to win, our courage and our imagination.
Read more:
- “Appreciate the opportunity to be yourself”
Since we cannot part with ourselves, the best friends of youth are inseparable, like these birds, which can only be raised as a pair. When they leave school, first one accompanies the other home, and then, not wanting to part, the second decides in turn to take the friend home, and so on several times … Then one comes to visit the other or even spends the evening with him. As soon as they part, they begin to call back, not only for the pleasure of hearing each other, but also because both are now in the age of constant presentification (formation in the mind of the representation of the present moment), and therefore they need to express what they feel, precisely at that time. the moment they feel it and live it before the feeling is forgotten. There is almost love tension in the relationship of two young best friends: they feel the need to constantly see each other, talk, do something together, share thoughts and dreams.
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- Find the real you
The best friend, being an instrument of self-conquest, also plays the role of a “third”, helping the teenager to separate from his parents. Paradoxically, a teenager separates from his own family and at the same time becomes attached to his friend’s family, which becomes a reference point and an object of comparison for him. Regardless of whose benefit this comparison turns out to be, it itself means that the child, in spite of everything, needs a family.
The best friend acts as a litmus test of those qualities that are characteristic of adolescence. Once we have established ourselves sufficiently, have known ourselves, have become confident in our own merits, once we have become able to recognize some of our shortcomings, we can leave our best friend for the simple reason that we no longer need him.
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- To you my best friend
Some do not part with a friend of youth all their lives; for them, he becomes a named brother (or sister), with whom the connection was not imposed by genes. But I think that, ideally, life separates the best friends at some point so that they never find out about the forgery that they essentially were for each other. And they continued to believe that everything drawn in their imagination was true.
Подробнее см. Mr. Rufo “Untie me! Separating to grow” (Editions Anne Carriere, 2005).