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.
Ah, but man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what is a heaven for …
I found Richard Frankel's treatise on the adolescent psyche to be an invaluable and often touching synthesis of concepts-historical, existential and clinical-that enhances the literature and gives renewed respect, honour and meaning to the adolescent struggle (and to those clinicians who are willing to struggle with the adolescent and can carry the commitment for the adolescent to stay in the struggle of the relationship to and with the Self).
Frankel divides his book into four sections, beginning with ‘Theoretical perspective on adolescence’. Chapters 1 & 2 respectively are ‘Psychological approaches’ and ‘Developmental analytical psychology’. These chapters are reviews of the literature with the added dimension of looking at where the psychology of adolescence has come from (Freud, etc.), where it is now (phenomenology), and where it might move toward (a synthesis of theories emphasizing a teleological perspective). Frankel sees the meaning and function of adolescence as a manifestation of individual psychic emergence. Here adolescence is both an archetype and a functional reality. Frankel desires ‘… to mend the split between reflectively engaging adolescence as a purposive phenomenon … and the day to day clinical realities facing us as therapists’. He disdains ‘a theory of adolescence that does not in some way connect with the “spirit” of the time [as] dry and academic’, but is concerned lest ‘one that overspiritualizes adolescence, transfixed by its symbology and numinosity, leaves nothing to hold onto when it comes to facing the enormously complex set of problems that are encountered by the adolescent therapist (sic)’. Frankel seeks a way ‘to bring the two together: an imaginative, non-pathologizing approach to the transformational nature of adolescence which, at the same time, has direct and relevant implications for practice’.
Part II looks at ‘Adolescence, initiation and the