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Beta Copley, as the cover of this book tells us, worked for seventeen years in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic in London, and continues to work as a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist, now in private practice. This volume attests to the quality of that experience and to the range of sympathies and flexibility of practice which she brings to her clinical work with adolescents: the conceptual underpinning is that of object relations, with particular emphasis on the work of Melanie Klein and of the post-Kleinian development, especially the work and teaching of Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer.
In Part I, Copley makes use of three major literary texts—Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado about Nothing, and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin —to illustrate the predicament of adolescence, the fluidity of normal adolescent development, and the ways in which adolescents may fail or be failed. The texts provide vivid examples of emotional impoverishment, benign and malignant narcissism, failed relationships and destructive behaviour in the young characters, and their elders if not betters; she traces the individual and group feelings of persecution and revenge—and in some cases catastrophic actual violence—and of consequent shame, guilt and attempted reparation. She quotes Pushkin's marvellous phrase, 'the agitation of inexperience', to describe Tatyana's overwhelmed feelings of adolescent passion for the title of her third chapter of literary and psychological exegesis.
In Part III, entitled 'Studies in Therapy', clinical examples similarly illustrate ways in which developmental progress can be stifled or blocked, and how a range of therapeutic interventions, of varying duration and depth, may unblock such premature or aberrant closures. The accent throughout is upon flexibility of response and the art of the possible; for example, initial interventions may be minimal and brief involving the individual or the family, or may proceed by degree