You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is a collection of papers produced by members of the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic. It is edited by Robin Anderson and Anna Dartington who have both also produced two of the strongest papers in the book. By its very nature, as a collection of separate papers, the book is uneven in its quality. Some of the papers give the impression of having been written primarily for some other occasion and having then had their emphasis slightly altered to make them suitable for this book. This may, of course, not be the case. It may be that the wish to show the wide spectrum of ‘adolescent disturbance’ and the diversity of the work being carried out at times leaves this collection feeling rather disparate, without a unifying focus. Some major areas of adolescent disturbance such as drug addiction or delinquent behaviour are merely mentioned, but not addressed in detail. That said, this is a worthwhile and immensely readable book, full of descriptions of careful and painstaking work, with clinical vignettes which bring the troubled adolescent vividly in front of us and with a solid theoretical base, rooted for the most part in post-Kleinian thinking, which underpins the work undertaken.
The introduction by Anderson and Dartington uses the history of the Adolescent Department to set the theme of adolescence in context, within both literature and the outside world. Anna Dartington's paper, which begins the book, is written with such warmth and humanity it makes the reader eager for more. Her interest in the everyday aspects of teenage life which many of us take for granted, such as the language and the T-shirts, grabbed my attention and I was impressed by her formulation that the ‘sort of's and ‘you know's that litter teenage speech work as a language ‘in which there are limitless possibilities to express