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This latest collection of papers on child analysis has as its focal point a symposium on adolescence convened in memory of Seymour Lustman. In two very interesting papers on the super-ego and ego-ideal in adolescence Settlage and Blos draw parallels between the modification of the super-ego in adolescence and Winnicott's concepts of the transitional object and the location of cultural experience in the space between inside and outside. They believe that at all stages of development this intermediate zone of experience is a crucial one and it is here that internalization and re-externalization occur in adolescence too. These papers are well illustrated by clinical examples and link with the other papers in the symposium.
A preliminary report by Radford, Wiseberg, and Yorke on a research project at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic into heroin addiction, using a profile for assessment, is disappointing. Although the two accounts of cases are interesting from a clinical point of view, it does not emerge how they serve the purposes of research. An account of the thesis of the research project and an outline of how the profile is to be used to support this thesis would be welcome.
Taken as a whole this series of papers is an important addition to the literature of late adolescence.
The second section, which is a theoretical one, offers varied fare. The outstanding paper is Burgner and Edgcumbe's lucid and well-developed account of need-satisfaction and object constancy in early object relationships. In this paper they clarify further the earliest stages of infant development: when the primary stage of mother-baby unity is succeeded by the first awareness of two, the earliest relationship is a need-satisfying, biologically based one oriented to the feeding function as a whole, and only later are part objects related to as distinct from the function.
Very different is Edelson's paper ‘Language and dreams’, in which he attempts to bring together the first chapter of The interp