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Mary Brady’s latest book is an exploration of adolescence, focusing in particular on body-related symptoms, such as cutting, anorexia, substance abuse, bulimia and even suicide, the extreme act of killing one’s own body. It is a highly relevant approach, not only because Brady considers thinking about symptoms and their resolutions as a fundamental aspect of psychoanalysis, but also because she explores the intricate relationship between mind and body, which is crucial for the development of our field. The title’s subheading underlines Brady’s tendency to relate physical symptoms to psychic isolation, a state which she sees as caused by difficulties with separation and the process of mourning for the adolescent’s parental figures at this extremely delicate time. In the book the idea of isolation has also, at times, a different and more profound meaning, namely the internal isolation from one’s self and body. The adolescent, Brady writes, faces a body that is ‘something apart and separate from the self’ (p. 12). Unfortunately the dissociation/integration of the body (see Lombardi, 2017) is not clearly addressed in this volume on adolescence, which is quite striking considering that one of the aims of the book is to focus on the body from a psychoanalytic perspective.
The book is divided into seven chapters, all rich in clinical material, which enables the reader to fully comprehend the dynamics being discussed. The first chapter ‘Unjoined persons’ addresses the isolation of the adolescent caused by separation from the parents, focusing in particular on different transitional moments, like the risky transition into high school and college. Brady highlights the fundamental importance of the adolescent capacity ‘to imagine her way into a new world’ (p. 18) through the imagination of a well functioning external couple.
The body seems to have a central role for Catherine, who focuses on clothes and shoes. Brady writes that she ‘seemed to be using her identification with me