The author reviews the developmental stage of early adolescence as a time of intensely renewed conflict over separation-individuation. The external environment (e.g., the availability of role models for identification, responses to the adolescent's acting out, social mores, etc.) plays a crucial role in easing or

disrupting the developmental processes, particularly of adolescents made more vulnerable by earlier developmental arrests. Miller points out with vivid examples the ways in which our current society at large, as well as common practices in our therapeutic and penal institutions, enhances regression rather than growth and adult resolution in our early adolescents.