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Adolescent Casebook, edited by Jack and Kerry Kelly Novick, is a comprehensive contribution to the psychoanalytic literature on adolescence. This 2022 volume gathers 58 contributors from around the world and presents 19 psychoanalytic processes spanning the period from prepuberty to emerging adulthood. The editors, well known for their long-standing developmental and ego-psychological orientations, frame the book as a challenge to what they view as a persistent bias against adolescent analysis within classical psychoanalytic theory and practice. Countering the assumption that adolescents are not analyzable, they argue that psychoanalysis not only can work with this population but that it is, in fact, the treatment of choice for severely distressed young people.
Each of the book's five sections—Passage Through Puberty, Early Adolescence, Middle Adolescence, Late Adolescence, and Emerging Adulthood—contains several cases followed by two or three commentaries and an editorial reflection by the Novicks. This layered and dialogical format is reminiscent of a psychoanalytic case conference. By keeping both the case writers and the commentators anonymous, the editors seek to promote greater openness and authenticity in the exchange of clinical ideas.
The dialogical format occasionally leads to unevenness among the commentaries, however. In one instance, a commentator departs from the main case to present material from another adolescent analysis, creating a momentary sense of disorientation. While such variety reflects the openness the editors aim to foster, it also illustrates the difficulty of maintaining coherence within an anonymized, multi-voiced structure. Of the 58 contributors, which the editors describe as “psychoanalysts from around the world,” 45 are based in the United States and the remaining 13 in the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Italy, Sweden, Mexico, Argentina, and the Netherlands. The inclusion of international cases—such as those conducted in India and La