"The House in which..." — Psychic Retreat and Teenager's Inner World

The presented dissertation is an attempt to apply John Steiner's concept of psychic retreat to analyze a work of fiction, in this case — Mariam Petrosyan's book “The House in Which...” In order to accomplish this goal, we analyzed psychoanalytical literature that describes the principles of psychic retreat and similar phenomena. Since the main characters of the analyzed book are adolescents, the work also explores the main concepts used to describe the processes of adolescence, which are inherent to this period and condition the possible use of psychic retreat. The work develops the idea of psychic retreat as a quasi-setting of adolescence, that is, as a false, imaginary space that allows the adolescent to find a foothold in the raging “chaos of puberty.” The characters in the book are examined both in isolation, focusing on the individual characteristics of each teenager and their personal histories, and as elements of a single psychic apparatus, where each teenager is a part of the Self, and the House is the pathological organization of the personality that unites these parts, providing them with shelter and meaning, demanding submission and maintaining the status quo in return. The confrontation between the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the Self, in this book represented as the characters of Blind and Sphinx respectively, is also examined. Exit from the psychic retreat is possible only by successfully going through grief - most of the characters in the book are incapable of this due to the lack of representation of this important psychic process in their psyche, surrounded by unbearable anxieties and the need to rebuild their personality at puberty. The lack of a reliable primary object and primary environment, the impossibility of grief, and the anxieties of adolescence all lead to the fragility of the adolescent Self and become the basis for the establishment of a psychic retreat as a pathological defense. The adolescent Self takes refuge in a shelter where perversive mechanisms of reality perception operate, which allows it to avoid encountering a frustrating, unbearable reality and “postpone” its adulthood, thus avoiding the experiences associated with the peculiarities of adolescence.