Late Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Studies: Edited by David Dean Brockman, M.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1984. 367 pp.

In his Introduction to this collection of fifteen essays, David D. Brockman reviews psychoanalytic and psychosocial data from college youths to persuasively argue that late adolescence is a specific

developmental phase. He adds that current views of late adolescence can be enriched by the recent contributions of Kohut's psychology of the self and by Mahler's developmental theory of separation-individuation.

Brockman observes that college students frequently complain of depression, while to the clinician they appear narcissistically preoccupied and withdrawn. The task of object removal, with its attendant mourning and regression in the service of defense, does not adequately account for these clinical phenomena, according to Brockman. In addition, one needs to consider selfobject failures in mirroring and idealizing. These may precipitate not only depression, but sexual perversion, hypochondriacal preoccupation, or more severe fragmentation. Perhaps a third of the contributors to this anthology are of this persuasion, but authors with different points of view have also been included. For some readers this editorial decision may make for theoretical and clinical richness and diversity; for others it may seem to lead to an unwarranted eclectic pastiche. Just a few papers, from representative points of view, will be reviewed.

In "Continuities and Transformations between Infancy and Adolescence," Joseph Lichtenberg makes the discerning observation that "a recent trend … to apply patterns of early development to later stages" (p. 7) may obscure the often momentous transformations which occur along the way from infancy to adolescence. Using clinical data, Lichtenberg illustrates a dual view of development as both continuous and subject to periodic transformations. Yet a couple of his vignettes seem to be at variance with this important observation. For example, sixteen-year-old Stanley was brought to treatment by his warm and caring parents because he was a solit