The Body in Adolescence: Psychic Isolation and Physical Symptoms. By Mary T. Brady. New York:  Routledge, 2016,  xiv + 118 pp., $200.00 hardcover, $49.95 paperback. Analytic Engagements with Adolescents: Sex, Gender, and Subversion. By Mary T. Brady. New York:  Routledge, 2018,  xii + 145 pp., $155.00 hardcover, $43.95 paperback.

Mary Brady's sensitive, thought-provoking books make a pair. The first, The Body in Adolescence, explores the ways that the adolescent's developmental tasks are sometimes met by a turn to the body in symptoms that reflect the experience of psychic isolation, an isolation that is in part a necessary aspect of that development but also entails a delicate tightrope walk across what can feel like a great abyss between the life of the child and emerging adulthood. The second, Analytic Engagements with Adolescents, highlights the adolescent's journey toward discovering adult sexuality and gender experience. Over several chapters in this second book, Brady asks us to contemplate the adolescent's path in this arena, particularly when that path has gone awry. She uses the concept of subversion to address the adolescent's necessary rebellion, as internal and external self- and object relations are reconfigured in an adult body with its new capacities and maturing mind. It is clear that Brady believes in nurturing reflectiveness so that the adolescent becomes increasingly able to use a thoughtful mind in encountering challenges, as opposed to retreating to bodily symptoms such as cutting, drug and alcohol abuse, disordered eating, and suicidality.