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With the publication of this book, Karen Gilmore and Pamela Meersand have changed the psychoanalytic outline of development, given us new insights into the experience of being a young adult and pointed us to where developmental research needs to go in the future. They state, “Our mission in this book is to create a psychodynamic synthesis of the accumulated research on emerging adults in juxtaposition with a deeper exploration of emerging adulthood as a developmental phase (ix).” They have accomplished this mission and the reader of this volume will benefit from their efforts.
It is my hope that the reader of this review will understand why it is important that all clinicians read this book. The book is divided into four parts: Introduction, Phases of emerging adulthood, Developmental tasks and the role of the peer group in emerging adulthood, and Mental health in emerging adulthood. I will attempt to briefly summarize what I saw as the most important points of the book and add a few of the thoughts the book provoked for me.
As they did with their 2014 text (Gilmore and Meersand 2014), in Chapter 1 they present a complex view of development which appreciates individual differences, recognizes the mind as made up of conscious and unconscious domains, and integrates important research from outside psychoanalysis. They also do an admirable job of preserving what is useful in psychoanalytic developmental theory of the last hundred years while acknowledging its limitations. In particular, they discuss what is useful in thinking about developmental phases as Freud (1905) had described, and Freud’s developmental lines (1965), while also explaining the ways we now understand this thinking to be wrong. Using the format of their previous volume on development, Gilmore and Meersand illustrate many of their ideas with short vignettes and easily accessed video clips; and they end each chapter with a list of key points.
Gilmore and