Streetcorner Research. By Ralph Schwitzgebel.  Harvard University Press, 1964.  163 pp.: Society and the Adolescent Self-Image. By Morris Rosenberg.  Princeton University Press, 1965.  326 pp.

Interest in understanding the adolescent—both normal and abnormal—has increased greatly in recent years among the general public and among scientists concerned with human behavior. The two books reviewed here represent significant contributions to the accumulating research literature on the subject. Yet, while each has much to offer the student of adolescence, they will be somewhat disappointing to those with psychoanalytic orientation and training.

Schwitzgebel's interesting and provocative report of a research study in the treatment of juvenile delinquents is at times almost defensive in its compulsive need to contrast “experimental therapy” with the author's concept of psychoanalysis as a therapy. The work by Rosenberg, which involves a comprehensive survey of attitudes of adolescents in relation to their self-image, is written with an almost total disregard for, or at least a total lack of official recognition of, the insights concerning adolescents obtainable from the psychoanalytic literature.

Streetcorner Research reports on a project designed to evaluate a variety of approaches, both interview and noninterview types, to work with juvenile delinquents. It recognizes that much of society's efforts at dealing with delinquency are not founded on any clearly defined conceptual or philosophic approach or one based on any experimental evidence. The author reports on the use of different interview techniques in psychotherapy and describes projects in which the delinquent was enlisted both as participant and as coworker with the project staff in searching for ways to alter delinquent behavior to a more desirable form.

Schwitzgebel credits the underlying idea for his research to his reading of an article by Herbert Strean in an issue of this Journal.* Strean's asking his young adolescent patient for his advice as to how the therapist should proceed with therapy led Schwitzgebel to develop an approach to the treatment of delinquents in which the individual delinquent was