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In a field of research where the criteria of psychoanalysis are rigorously applied, this book is the result of many years of collaboration between psychoanalysts and psychotherapists from the Tavistock Clinic and the Brent Consultation Centre, in London, and a group of their Italian counterparts who have been trained in the Tavistock orientation and work in consultation centres for young people and adolescents. The credit goes to Simonetta Adamo for the work of editing and bringing together a variety of articles illustrating the experiences in brief consultations accumulated in England for quite some years by now, and in Italy over the last ten years. As Bianca Iaccarino stresses in her foreword, this is a significant contribution, since it sets out to provide the clinical and theoretical elements needed to justify a method of intervention for the psychological problems of adolescents and young adults which takes the concepts and constructs of psychoanalysis as its point of reference, adapted according to the specific setting proposed. Furthermore, the setting is obviously influenced by the fact that the Consultation Centre is a part of larger institutions such as the National Health Service, the University, and so on. On the other hand, as Adamo stresses in her introduction, the aims of the consultation are not immediately therapeutic, and the idea is not to effect structural changes in the young patient, changes which only a long-term therapy can induce.
In consultation work, there is a preordained time limit, ranging from four to ten sessions: this is important and necessary, even though it may activate feelings of loss, insufficiency and resentment. Gianna Polacco Williams notes that highly disturbed youngsters are attracted to a time limited commitment, and remarks that the request for help, liable to create profound anxiety related to the formation of a bond, is often disproportionate to the gravity of the problems.