Reality and Other Adolescent Worlds

The eerie and upside-down world of adolescence

Source: Morfeoleoncl/Pixabay

Famed psychoanalyst Margot Waddell wrote about “the eerie and upside-down world” of adolescent fiction in her 2018 book On Adolescence.¹ She observed that fiction aimed at young adults often depicts two worlds: one in which the protagonists are fully involved in ordinary adolescent life, and another, alternative version of reality, furnished by uncertainty, guilt, sexual and destructive urges and peculiar, often violent experiences that they have to survive.

Tony Tanner, writing about American teen fiction almost five decades earlier, suggested that adolescent protagonists often live in a kind of “edge-city” on the threshold between life and death; sanity and madness; thinking and mindlessness; depression and mania; intimacy and perversity; fantasy and reality; accommodation and rebellion.²

In my work with adolescents, I’m always curious about their realities and other worlds – the stuff they read, stream and watch on repeat – which is often furnished with similar themes to those identified in the literature. There’s a reason they are drawn to this stuff. As is so often the case, art reflects life reflects art, and many adolescents and young adults find themselves living “on the edge”.

Perhaps the most eerie and upside-down world in contemporary fiction is the mysterious alternative dimension in the Netflix teen drama Stranger Things.³ The Upside Down first made an appearance at the end of season one of the popular series. It mirrors reality and is filled with toxic flora and fauna and murderous creatures that share a collective consciousness or “hive mind”. The Upside Down wasn’t created; it has always existed and has infinite variations. Over consecutive seasons, a group of adolescents witness supernatural forces and secret government exploits as they search for answers to extraordinary mysteries. There have been depictions of trauma, depression, social isolation and survivor guilt. The genre is science fiction, but the themes are proper adolescent, to coin an adjective popular among this demographic. The drama is set in the 1980s and accompanied by a fabulously nostalgic soundtrack, but the themes are timeless.

In the season-four finale, the antagonist Vecna encapsulates adolescence when he says: “I saw so many things [in The Upside Down], then one day I found the most extraordinary thing of all. Something that would change everything. I saw a means to realise my potential.”³ That quote encapsulates adolescence, and is pertinent to the process of adolescent psychotherapy, which can be a means of helping young adults to realise their potential.

But what of reality? At the risk of sounding like an adolescent gripped by existential crisis, I’d like to pose the question, Is there any such thing? According to Winnicott, reality is co-created. The external world and everything in it, including relationships – especially relationships – only exist if they survive destructive fantasies.⁴ The relationships that survive are those that matter and, therein, the individuals who are sufficiently robust to withstand the unconscious hateful attacks that are an inevitable part of relationships. Thought about this way, nothing has meaning until it is assigned meaning. Nothing can survive if it isn’t loved enough. To adolescents, this feels both reassuring and terrifying.

The impact of the disruption and death that resulted from Covid-19 should not be denied or diminished. The pandemic plunged all of us into a different reality — a “new normal” — but it was Gen Z and the so-called “Covid Kids” who felt those changes most acutely, and for whom the impact is most enduring. Many lost faith in authority figures to do the right thing, and their confidence in the way the world works was rocked. Thinking through those experiences can help adolescents feel on firmer, realler, less shaky ground.

This post is based on the chapter "(Not) the end of the f*cking world" in my book, You’re Not My F*cking Mother and Other Things Gen Z Say in Therapy (2024)