Developmental Breakdown and Psychoanalytic Treatment in Adolescence: Clinical Studies: By M. Laufer and M. E. Laufer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1989. Pp. 217.

Psychoanalytic explorations of adolescence are as old as the field itself. From Freud's first investigations of the psychology of hysteria, through the development of ego psychology and the related concept of identity, to the emergence of separation-individuation theory and self psychology, psychoanalysts have learned much from their adolescent patients. Psychoanalytic theories about adolescence have ranged from Freud's formulation that intensified libidinal forces result in a resurgence of oedipal conflicts, to concepts of the reshaping of the ego, superego and identity, to theories centring on the adolescent self either in terms of continuing separation from parents or transformations of the nature of selfobjects.

Developmental Breakdown and Psychoanalytic Treatment in Adolescence continues the process in which adolescent patients enrich psychoanalytic understanding of human psychology and psychoanalytic formulations enhance our picture of this developmental era. The Laufers and their co-workers, in an important series of papers and books, have already contributed an exceptionally rich picture of adolescent development. Their work centres on the psychological meaning of the transformation of the adolescent body that has become physically capable of what could only be fantasized in childhood. The adolescent's central task, in the Laufers' view, is the psychological integration of the newly sexually and physically capable body. Turmoil of adolescence, which the Laufers, like most psychoanalysts but unlike many developmental psychologists, regard as normative, is an ordinary manifestation of this process. Since it is a new body that must be psychologically integrated, it is not surprising that action on or about this body is central to adolescent psychology. Thus action is an expectable feature of this time of life.

The task of integrating the new bodily self with older psychological imagoes or fantasies is carried out as well as most clearly manifest in the 'c