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Karen Gilmore and Pamela Meersand of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research have already jointly authored a comprehensive volume (Gilmore & Meersand, 2014) and an accessible handbook (Gilmore & Meersand, 2015) on human development, as well as a primer on play therapy (Meersand & Gilmore, 2017). In Emerging Adulthood, they offer yet another highly useful volume, now focused upon a unique psychodynamic exploration of this developmental phase.
Gilmore and Meersand orient the reader at the outset to the fact that emerging adulthood was proposed only a quarter of a century ago. Coined by developmental psychologist J. J. Arnett (2000), it initially spanned the age range of 18 to 24 years and was subsequently extended to the end of the third decade of life. The phase details the distinct tasks and challenges of young people that materialized in tandem with the technological novelty of the 21st century (Arnett, 2014).
The reader with curiosity or even doubts about the creation of a new developmental phase will appreciate the thoughtfulness of Gilmore and Meersand's persuasive supporting argument. The authors organize the writings of their psychoanalytic predecessors on adolescence (Blos, 1962, 1979; Erickson, 1968; Freud, 1958; Laufer, 1986; Laufer & Laufer, 1989), as well as those of contemporary writers on emerging and subsequent works in the psychoanalytic literature (Gilmore, 2019; Knight & Miller, 2017; Miller, 2017; Schechter et al., 2018; Shulman, 2017), to show how psychoanalytic developmental theory both anticipated the phase and provides an avenue for its thoughtful advancement.