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Adolescent Breakdown and Beyond is a very readable, concise book, containing many clinical examples, which make it easily accessible not only to psychoanalysts involved or interested in the treatment of adolescents, but to the allied caring professions, as well as to parents, and even adolescents themselves. This is, in itself, a praiseworthy achievement.
The book is divided into two sections. The first of these is composed of five introductory chapters, homogeneous in style, and complementary in content, written by staff or former staff members of the Brent Adolescent Centre, who define and deal with ‘The Adolescent and Developmental Breakdown’, its assessment, treatment and limitations. The second section contains four presentations that were discussed by various professionals from different centres and constitute the proceedings of the ‘Conference on Adolescent Breakdown and Beyond’, which was held in October 1995, for the Brent Adolescent Centre is also a Centre for Research into Adolescent Breakdown whose aims include: the prevention of breakdown, an ongoing investigation into the field, and the possibility for exchange with other colleagues with different points of view, based on different experiences.
In the opening chapter, ‘Developmental breakdown in adolescence: problems of understanding and helping’ (and in Chapter 6, pp. 75-87), Moses Laufer responds to the task of differentiating ‘between normal stress and signs of developmental breakdown’ (p. 4) that lead to an increase in attempted suicide, ‘sudden signs of mental illness’ such as schizophrenia, anorexia, drug addiction, severe depression, sexual abnormality and violence in the adolescent. He feels that ‘there are not only new stresses following physical sexual maturity but that … adolescence is a time of special vulnerability to breakdown’ (p. 4). This physically mature body ‘is able either to impregnate or become pregnant—a fact that must always be kept in the forefront of our thinking when trying to