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For some time there have been differing points of view regarding adolescence as a developmental stage: Some scholars conclude that it should proceed quite smoothly and without traumatic experience while others believe this stage to be inherently susceptible to trauma.
After reading Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of the Severely Disturbed Adolescent, you may be more inclined to view adolescence as a stage of life vulnerable to the development of psychic trauma. We are given varying theoretical explanations for working with a traumatized adolescent in the course of seven chapters. Each chapter was written by a European analyst, three of whom are women, each a senior analyst and several trained or working at the Tavistock Clinic, London.
These are really seven distinctive papers. The collection starts with Margot Waddell's description of a complex treatment: “A mind of one's own: introjective processes and the capacity to think.” This extremely well written paper—Waddell's credits include a Doctorate in English Literature from Cambridge—describes the treatment of an eighteen-year-old young man, a school drop-out who is filled with perverse sexual fantasies and other serious symptoms. The treatment emphasis is on introjection, differentiation, and separation, which the author treats in an intriguing way. She quotes Keats and Virginia Woolf and supports Donald Meltzer's comment (1978) that introjection is the most important and most mysterious concept in psychoanalysis.
Philippe Jeammet's paper: “Links between internal and external reality in devising a therapeutic setting for adolescents who present with serious conduct disorder,” is a rigorous and thorough essay by an analyst who writes with authority and certainty, astonishing given the difficult treatment problems he confronts. Jeammet's “silver thread” (p. 29), his common denominator that helps us to understand the troubling behaviors of puberty, is the concept of dependency and its relationship between internal and e