Adolescence

This short edited collection gathers five clinicians of the object-relations tradition around a single developmental crisis: the passage out of childhood and the psychic upheaval it sets in motion. Inge Wise assembles chapters on violence as a defence against breakdown, work with suicidal adolescents, addiction, and the daily pragmatics of the consulting room, each grounded in case material rather than survey. The contributors treat the adolescent's turmoil as meaningful rather than merely disruptive, reading acting out, withdrawal, and self-harm as attempts to manage an unsettled internal world.

For the practising therapist the value lies in its close attention to technique: how far to hold the frame with a patient who may not return, when silence protects and when it abandons, how the countertransference shifts under adolescent provocation. Brief and clinically focused, it functions less as a textbook than as a set of worked examples from analysts who have sat with these patients and written about what they found.