Book Notices

ADOLESCENCE AND THE CONFLICT OF GENERATIONS. By Gerald H. J. Pearson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1958, 186 pp., $3.95.

This book is addressed primarily to professional workers in fields concerned with adolescents, but the author expresses the hope that it will also be read by parents and adolescents themselves. Pearson attempts to explain the reactions of adults to adolescents as his primary goal. In doing so, his approach is psychoanalytic. Adult intolerance of adolescents is produced by the repudiation of the repressed. The struggle of the adolescent toward the establishment of his identity is subject to the forces of the upsurging sexual impulses, the process of growth, regressive tendencies, the resistance of the older generation and cultural patterns which deny the adolescent a secure position and set of values in the world in which he lives. Pearson believes that there is an alternation in the attitudes of successive generations which reflects the rebellions of adolescents toward their immediate forebears, but states that he does not know whether this contributes the "evolution" which he discerns in the social scene with regard to interhuman relationships. He concludes his book with advice to the protagonists of the conflict and to those who deal with them on various levels of professional contact.

ADVANCES IN PSYCHIATRY. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS. Edited and with an Introduction by Mabel Blake Cohen. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1959, 314 pp., $4.95.

This book consists of a group of articles which originally appeared between 1940 and 1957 in Psychiatry. The general orientation is reflected in the Introduction by the Editor: i.e., the last two decades of the growth of new concepts and techniques in psychiatry have largely arisen from the influence on the social sciences with their emphasis on group behavior. "And the logical consequence—that study of such behavior would then provide information about drives, motivations, c