The Adolescent Passage. Developmental Issues: By Peter Blos. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1979. 521 pp.

This collection of papers, all but the last previously published, summarizes the author's contributions to the study of adolescence, in which a developmental point of view has been productive of many instructive observations and conceptualizations. Written clearly and well, the formulations are supported by ample clinical data and are

buttressed by a scholarly mastery of the relevant analytic literature. The book succeeds in its aim to enable the clinician better to distinguish pathology from those aspects of adolescent behavior and emotional states which are normal for the adolescent process. It is rich in information about a period of life which must be understood in the analysis of every adult patient.

The titles of the sections of the book under which the papers are grouped give a view of the scope and the emphases of this volume. Under the heading, "The Mutual Influence of the Adolescent and His Surround," the importance of successfully negotiating each phase of development as a requirement for effectively dealing with the developmental demands of the next phase of life is highlighted with impressive clinical detail. Blos notes that some middle-class latency youngsters coming from progressive and liberal backgrounds may be so overburdened by close family ties, so steeped in accepting and understanding attitudes, that it is most difficult for them to modify and alter libidinal attachments. Such an upbringing, during which object relations are not replaced by identifications, can interfere with normal latency development. The ego's successful negotiation of latency is a necessary prerequisite for healthy adolescent development. Those youngsters in whom latency ties are not loosened are frequently unprepared to deal with the normal adolescent regression, which is then experienced as a developmental obstacle rather than as an adaptive and progressive element in their growing up.

The task of the adolescent ego is to bring to bear, through the mandatory devel