Psychosocial Problems of College Men: Edited by Bryant M. Wedge, M.D. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. 291 pp.

Editorial excellence is the hallmark of this new volume written by the staff of the Division of Student Mental Health of Yale University. The editor in his lead-off chapter explains how his interest in the age period of roughly seventeen to twenty-two years was activated by recent ego theory. Prior to the advances epitomized by Erikson's concepts of 'psychosocial moratoria' and identity, it had been held that the personality was well formed before this age period and that later events were mainly an expression or an unfolding of what had previously been molded and fixed. The new emphasis encourages the scrutiny of the processes of personality reorganization that may be determined by such significant experiences as matriculation in college, and the course of the ensuing interaction with the individual.

The years twelve to seventeen are commonly recognized as a period during which there is a resurgence of instinctual drives that strains the controls of the ego and necessitates much countercathexis. Much less is known about the tasks of the ego during the period referred to in this volume as the 'ephebic' period. It is the