You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is an amalgam of papers written by thirty-two contributors drawn from eleven countries. It is the third volume in a series sponsored by the International Association for Child Psychiatry and Allied Professions. Serge Lebovici, its president, functions purely as an editor of this tome while Gerald Caplan, co-editor, is also the author of one of the thirty-one papers.
The book is in six sections, and two of these are further divided into subsections. All sections and subsections are preceded by an editor's introduction which endeavors to tie the pieces together so that they will appear to be related if not actually connected. The editors alert the reader to the similarities and the contrasts he will encounter in the particular series of papers to follow. They highlight the cardinal elements or the main thrust of each paper. As might be expected in any multi-authored work, some parts of the book are better written, more interesting or easier to digest than others.
In their introduction to the book as a whole, the editors state that adolescence is a developmental period marked by a rapid increase in the capacity for abstract conceptualization and an interest in active exploration and analysis of the world. Here they are patently borrowing from Piaget's studies. They further observe that adolescents often confront us with fundamental questions about our adult ways.
The editors believe that the adolescent's freedom from adult bias and stereotyped thinking may frequently result in his seeing a situation more clearly and truly than we do. They credit the adolescent population with proposing valuable, innovative approaches precisely because this segment of society is not aware of those “facts of life” to which we have accommodated ourselves. They do more than merely imply that our adjustment may have been unwarranted.
Although the editors may think this way, it is doubtful that all of the contributors to their book do. Caplan and Lebovici do a beautiful job of blending