Adolescent Fantasy: By Percival M. Symonds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. 397 pp.

This book represents a painstaking effort to penetrate the personality and conflicts of the adolescent. The method used is picture stories, first used by Murray in the Thematic Apperception Test. Forty adolescent boys and girls were presented a set of forty-two pictures carefully selected to stimulate fantasies. They were asked to make up stories of what was happening in the pictures. The study adds a good deal of information about ways adolescents fantasy. The adolescents selected were said to be relatively normal, well-adjusted youngsters. Excerpts from the records, however, suggest that some of them were quite unhappy and had conflicts beyond what might be expected in mature, well-adjusted individuals even during adolescence.

The subjects of this investigation were, in addition, interviewed by the tester. They submitted brief autobiographies, and one or both parents and teachers who knew the adolescents intimately were interviewed. A correlation was then made between these findings and the material obtained from the picture stories. An attempt was made to divide the material of the stories into a large