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This is an overdue and welcome collection of essays dealing with one of the most neglected and fascinating themes in psychoanalytic literature: adolescence. The editors offer us a collection of carefully selected papers by classical and contemporary leading authorities in a field that has been fighting for recognition since the early days of the psychoanalytic movement. The contributions by S. Freud, A. Freud, Jeanne Lample-de Groot, Peter Blos, Evelyne Kestemberg and Moses Laufer have already been part of the classical reading in the field of adolescence and psychoanalysis. The articles by M. Perret-Catipovic and Francois Ladame, Philippe Gutton and Raymond Cahn are relatively recent. They offer interesting and up-to-date psychoanalytic views of the process of adolescence.
With an emphasis on the developmental approach so valued by Anna Freud and her followers, this is not a compendium of the psychopathology of adolescence, but a collection of essays invested in providing an insight into the vicissitudes and destiny of the normal adolescent eruption, as well as into the processes that may lead to later pathology, both during adolescence and in adulthood. After reading this important psychoanalytical contribution, I could not help remembering the words of Moses Laufer who, throughout the years (like Peter Blos), enthusiastically and passionately referred to this phase of development as ‘the second chance to put things right’. For this is certainly an effort to put things right and bring us up to date in our knowledge of what young people go through during this crucial