Adolescents. Psychoanalytic Approach to Problems and Therapy.: Edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D. and Henry I. Schneer, M.D. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1961. 378 pp.

The editors and various contributors to this volume, an outgrowth of a series of lectures given to students of child psychiatry, are well known for their theoretical and practical knowledge of psychoanalysis, child analysis, and child psychology. Every one of these lectures as they are now published in the book shows clarity of presentation

and thoughtfulness of theoretical speculations. Selma Fraiberg's chapter on homosexual conflicts is a masterpiece of clinical description. Judith Kestenberg's chapter on puberty is a real contribution which systematizes our knowledge of female sexual development; she here summarizes her views and enlarges the knowledge outlined long ago by Freud and especially by Helene Deutsch.

Even thought I admired the individual chapters, I found the book as a whole rather disappointing. Rather than a comprehensive study of the 'psychoanalytic approach to problems in therapy', it is more a case book on adolescents. It lacks cohesiveness and uniformity of point of view. It indicates the difficulties encountered in treating adolescents and seems to confirm the lay concept that adolescents are rather impossible people and that their therapy is full of difficulties and danger. There is no chapter on the neurotic adolescent, the obsessive, or phobic. Although there is a chapter on learning problems, nothing is said about gifted adolescents and their difficulties.

I agree with Anna Freud and Dr. Lorand that the psychoanalysis of adolescents is a most taxing and often frustrating activity, but I cannot agree that the psychotherapy of adolescents is any more difficult than the therapy of a latency child or of an adult. Many of my colleagues and I have been impressed by the flexibility of many adolescent patients and by their capability of establishing a therapeutic alliance, perhaps not for years, but for a period of time sufficient to approach them with an analytically oriented psychotherapy. When the deep need of the adolescent to form ex