Therapists often forget adolescence. Not so the therapists contributing to this book. They highlight the importance of therapists - as well as parents, teachers, residential social workers, and others living and working with adolescents - attending to the inner world of the adolescent. They also highlight the importance of therapists being mindful of their own inner world as adolescents so as to be mindful of it and its repercussions in their adolescent and adult patients.

Moses Laufer begins by explaining the adult repercussions of adolescence. He dates adolescence as starting with puberty making it possible for girls to become pregnant and for boys to make them pregnant. He claims that puberty intensifies or launches a conflict between what the young person wants and what his conscience can countenance. He maintains that solutions to this conflict become fixed by the age of 21, thereby determining the young person's subsequent adult defences and sexual