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How sad to open this volume, which needs no recommendation, since it is an established classic of psychoanalysis today, and read that Dr Rudolph Lowenstein, one of the founder Editors of this series, has died.
It is impossible to comment on all the papers so I shall choose a few, with apologies to those whom I leave out.
First I shall comment on Dr Kurt Eissler's impeccable, yet so cautious, essay on Professor Freud's trauma in adolescence with Gisela. Only Dr Kurt Eissler could write this essay with an honesty which is matched with an equal capacity to narrate events. It is too early to judge what Dr Eissler says about the Professor's youthful romance with Gisela, since the correspondence he draws upon remains to be published, in its completeness. Be that as it may, I do wish to congratulate Dr Eissler on a piece of writing that is as true as it is arduous. For me to summarize his argument would be to cheat his virtue, so I recommend everybody to read it.
There is an article in this volume by Moses Laufer: The Nature of Adolescent Pathology and the Psychoanalytic Process. What he says merits reading, since he is a man of vast clinical experience. It is my belief that Dr Laufer mis-uses the English word 'Nature'. In the English language nature is the biological given, and adolescence is not a given, but what a child makes of himself: a mess or a person.
There is one paper by Dr Wayne Downey on the Transitional Phenomena in the Analysis of Early Adolescent Males. Winnicott's concept of the transitional phenomena has been misunderstood by the American analysts with a singular wilfulness. Winnicott never meant the 'transitional phenomena', as Dr Downey makes it out, to mean: an object, be it a thing or a person; but to signify a certain process of psychic life that is brought into coherence through maternal care of the human infant.
One must also mention two papers: one by Dr Samuel Ritvo: The Psychoanalytic Process in Childhood ; and another by Dr Harold Blum