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Mary Brady has given us two volumes, published within two years of each other, that pair well as a collection of essays on the multiplicity of psychic complexities in the turbulent world of adolescence. Brady's voice is clear and intelligent without becoming overdetermined and concrete; it creates a dexterous oscillation between the theoretical and clinical. Drawing frequently on the ideas of Alvarez, Bion, Green, Klein, Ogden and Winnicott, among others, Brady writes with a vivid sense that she has lived through a myriad of adolescent conflicts of the patients she writes about with respect and insight. It becomes clear that working with adolescents is a calling for Brady; she is intrigued—if not delighted—by this work, yet she elucidates the sometimes painful countertransferential hurdles she encounters in meeting the minds of the hardest to reach and sometimes self-destructive teenagers.
In the first book, Brady makes a significant contribution by connecting bodily based symptoms (anorexia, cutting, substance abuse) that have been previously written about separately in an attempt to explore the “underlying commonality of developmental themes” (2016, 2) inherent in many adolescents’ psychic struggles: “adolescence is a fulcrum of the body, the psychic, the family and the culture” (2016, 1). Brady's major premise is that within the adolescent developmental process, a key component of suffering and symptoms is derivative of what she terms “psychic isolation” (2016, 1). What caught my attention immediately in Chapter 1, “Unjoined Persons: Psychic Isolation in Adolescence and Its Relation to Bodily Symptoms,” was how valuable Brady's ideas were about psychic isolation, a term we use frequently when describing the inner lives of our patients. She describes this period of adolescent development as a minefield of change and new experiences, psychically and—true to her title—bodily. Of note is Brady's ability to create descriptions that are refreshing, not overburdened in t