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.
There is a long history of controversy in the psychoanalytic community with regard to the efficacy of the treatment of adolescents, especially young adolescents. There is, however, no controversy about the fact that when treatment is attempted it is often difficult and fraught with problems. For those of us who accept the challenge, new thoughts, whether on theory or technique, are always welcome. In this book Moses and Eglé Laufer describe their views on developmental breakdown in adolescence. Their credentials are outstanding. For two decades Moses Laufer has led a group in London that provides a walkin community service for disturbed adolescents. Evaluation and treatment are provided as needed. Most impressive is that psychoanalytic treatment is available to adolescent patients who could obtain it in no other way. The authors treat a severity of patients usually not available to or accepted by other analysts. Much has been learned at the Centre for Research into Adolescent Breakdown; this book is the result.
The Laufers still struggle with what differentiates breakdowns from depressive psychosis and schizophrenia, but state the former do not always become the latter. They understand breakdown "as part of the adolescent's reaction to being overwhelmed by fantasies containing both sexual and aggressive wishes related to his own body, fantasies which are contrary to the person's idealized body image" (p. xiii). With puberty and its increased biological, psychological and social demands, a break with reality and/or an attack on the body may be necessary for an adolescent to maintain the original distortion of the past that served to maintain psychic equilibrium during latency.
The Laufers stress the developmental aspects of adolescents' breakdown. They see it as necessarily causing a passive relationship to the parent of the same sex and a fixation of percepts of infantile sexuality. They also see adolescence as the developmental phase during which t