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This is the first volume in a monograph series of the International Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, and is divided into three main sections: Psychoanalytic Aspects; The Trauma of Physical and Psychosomatic lllness; and Social Disruption and the Adolescent Process.
In general, this is an uneven book. It is interesting in that it brings together writers from a disparate range of backgrounds and countries. This is good for North American parochialism and certainly challenged mine. However, only some of the articles are strictly about trauma. In addition, the articles have wildly different definitions of what constitutes trauma, from the first paper, which describes trauma as not being tuned into emotionally by mother, to the last paper, which deals with survivors of the Holocaust. These completely different understandings of trauma seem to trivialize the concept of trauma.
The first two papers in this section of the book consist of clinical case illustrations of adolescent psychoanalytic theory, stating that normal adolescents are ruled by their sexual and aggressive energies, which overwhelm their ego strengths, leading to symptoms and enactments of conflicts, which complicate their ability to integrate traumatic events. The problem is that adolescent psychoanalytic theory has not taken into account the fact that the majority of normal adolescents do not suffer symptoms. The psychoanalytic understanding of adolescents has been based on rather disturbed populations. While these case histories are helpful in understanding traumatized adolescents who are already vulnerable, they do not further our knowledge of normal adolescents in traumatic situations. Rubin's (USA) paper, “Trauma in Adolescents: Psychoanalytic Aspects,” illustrates the continuing problem of psychoanalytic theorizing about adolescence, when such theorizing is stuck in a classical backwater. He describes the case of a girl who presented with recurrent, mild, psychotic