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Tor-Björn Hägglund is a pioneer of psychoanalysis for adolescents in Finland, and has been in clinical co-operation with Raimo Hyttinen for twenty years. This book is a necessary new addition to the texts written on the psychoanalysis of young people. The writers' long and wide experience of adolescence, its growth and development, based on practice and research is conveyed to the reader from all three parts of the book: I ‘Growth during adolescence’, II ‘Special features of psychoanalysis for adolescents’, and III ‘Three case studies’. The authors suggest that in his or her external behaviour, the young person creates an interaction with the environment that resembles his or her past in detail. It is like a play telling of the hidden experience of his most difficult traumas, and on the other hand of the early germs of his actual growth.
In Part I the authors discuss the acting-out behaviour of young people and go briefly through the normative crises: breaking loose from the bonds of childhood, creation of the sexual body, and creation of a personal future. The development starts in the sphere of youth culture, from which the young person can create a generation gap. This is done where the soil is safe. The adolescent also needs support from the outside to be able to organise his growth process around the Oedipus complex. In one of his earlier books, (1990, Oidipus iänikuinen [The eternal Oedipus—Psychotherapy