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This book is about the young, what they are like and why. In addressing the adolescent experience, Blos situates us in the psychic spot where life is most difficult, most turbulent, and most adventurous. Traditionally, the deepest conflicts youths have with their elders are seen as coming from the problem of loosening object ties (A. Freud), as an expression of an identity crisis (Erikson) and, as seen by Blos, as resulting from “the second individuation process,” the one during adolescence. The basic principle running across the three formulations is that it is through conflict that maturity is to be acquired.
In working this vein, the author has stood at the center of a sustained and systematic clinical research effort since receiving his Ph.D. (in biology) in 1934. Blos here offers us the thoughts, theorizing, and distillation of a productive lifetime. He has selected the important papers from his past contributions, added several new sections to round out the gestalt; and offers us here what his professional life has been about. Since this is Peter Blos on the adolescent process, one opens the book in anticipation of a presentation flavored with the flair of a master chef in his favorite creation. The work, however, invokes in the reviewer the opening of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities; “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” The Adolescent Passage is a good book. It starts out as a bad book and is theoretically pithy. It is initially