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The proliferation of literature on the subject of adolescent therapy betokens the increase of casualties of the developmental process in these chaotic times, as well as the frustrations of those who seek to use classical psychoanalytic methods in the treatment of today's troubled young people. The psychoanalytic treatment of adolescents has had a checkered history, its recent status delineated by Anna Freud's 1968 comments about the 'young of today [who] … look … upon [it] as a procedure devised to deprive them of originality … and induce them to adapt and conform to existing conditions …'.1 Indeed, even in 1958, she spoke of the special difficulties in the analysis of adolescents that had led to 'many alternative forms of treatment for adolescents [being] evolved and practiced, such as manipulation of the environment, residential treatment, the setting up of therapeutic communities, etc.'.2
The present volume reports on some additions to Miss Freud's list. Here we find a collection of papers describing aspects of the application of group and family treatment methods to work with adolescent patients. The papers vary widely in their relevance to psychoanalysis, as well as in their intrinsic quality. Vann Spruiell's discussion of the phenomena of adolescent narcissism as they emerge in and have their impact on group therapy is in the best tradition of applied psychoanalytic thought: it shares this level of excellence, though not its conceptual orientation, with Helm Stierlin's scholarly