Puberty is a time of tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood activated by rapid physical changes, hormonal development and explosive activity of neurons. This book explores puberty through the parent-teenager relationship, as a "normal state of crisis", lasting several years and with the teenager oscillating between childlike tendencies and their desire to become an adult. The more parents succeed in recognizing and experiencing these new challenges as an integral, ineluctable emotional transformative process, the more they can allow their children to become independent. In addition, parents who can also see this crisis as a chance for their own further development will be ultimately enriched by this painful process. They can face up to their own aging as they take leave of youth with its myriad possibilities, accepting and working through a newfound rivalry with their sexually mature children, thus experiencing a process of maturity, which in turn can set an example for their children. This book is based on rich clinical observations from international settings, unique within the field, and there is an emphasis placed by the author on the role of the body in self-awareness, identity crises and gender construction. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, parents and carers, as well as all those interacting with adolescents in self, family and society.

Puberty is a time of tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood activated by rapid physical changes, hormonal development and explosive activity of neurons. This book explores puberty through the parent-teenager relationship, as a "normal state of crisis", lasting several years and with the teenager oscillating between childlike tendencies and their desire to become an adult. The more parents succeed in recognizing and experiencing these new challenges as an integral, ineluctable emotional transformative process, the more they can allow their children to become independent. In addition, parents who can also see this crisis as a chance for their own further development will be ultimately enriched by this painful process. They can face up to their own aging as they take leave of youth with its myriad possibilities, accepting and working through a newfound rivalry with their sexually mature children, thus experiencing a process of maturity, which in turn can set an example for their children. This book is based on rich clinical observations from international settings, unique within the field, and there is an emphasis placed by the author on the role of the body in self-awareness, identity crises and gender construction. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, parents and carers, as well as all those interacting with adolescents in self, family and society.

In the classic edition of this outstanding book, originally published in 1998, Richard Frankel explores adolescence as a crucial, unique, and turbulent period of human development. He provides guidance for clinicians working with young people as they undergo significant transformations in the way they think, act, feel, and perceive the world. The book addresses how the disruptions manifest in adolescent behavior are upsetting and often incomprehensible to the adults surrounding them. It seeks to revision the traumas, extreme fantasies, testing of limits, etc., so endemic to this period of life through the lens of the urge toward self-realization. This allows for new and creative ways of working with the intensely confusing, and often extreme, countertransference feelings that arise in our encounter with adolescents. It offers ways of reflecting upon the vicissitudes of our own experience of being an adolescent that helps to unlock the typical impasses that occur in the stand-off between adult and adolescent ways of seeing the world. Through engagement with the work of Jung, Hillman, and Winnicott, Frankel offers a critique of the traditional psychoanalytic understanding of adolescence as a recapitulation of childhood, thus making a claim for adolescence as a discrete developmental period with its own originary dynamics. In this light, he explores such topics as individuation, persona, shadow, bodily, idealistic and ideational awakenings, as well as the effects of culture on development. Featuring numerous clinical case studies and clear theoretical formulations, this classic edition is important reading for psychotherapists, analysts, parents, educators, and anyone working with adolescents. This classic edition also includes also includes a new, extended introduction by the author that examines what effects the digital revolution is having on the contemporary experience of being an adolescent. Looking back on this work nearly 25 years since its publication, Frankel contends that the core themes of adolescence addressed in this book offer a compelling framework for comprehending both the positive and negative impacts of the digital on adolescent life.

This book provides a powerfully argued and beautifully constructed account of the early development of the child in the family context from a psychoanalytic perspective. It draws on the theoretical trajectory from Sigmund Freud to Melanie Klein and Wilfried Bion.

Adolescence is one of the most fascinating and complex transitions in the human life span. Its breathtaking pace of growth and change is second only to that of infancy. Over the last two decades, the research base in the field of adolescence has had its own growth spurt. New studies have provided fresh insights while theoretical assumptions have changed and matured. This summary of an important 1998 workshop reviews key findings and addresses the most pressing research challenges.

The Little Book of Child and Adolescent Development presents a modern, psychoanalytically-informed summary of how the mind develops from infancy through young adulthood. It is a comprehensive work that integrates analytic theories with a contemporary systems model of development, and also draws on scholarly research from neighboring fields. Key models discussed include attachment theory, intersubjective theory, cognitive development theory, and infancy research. This book's contemporary approach to development makes it relevant to such timely topics as bullying, the experience of LGBT youth, preadolescent and adolescent use of the internet, and the struggles of young (emerging) adults in modern society. Written to optimize ease of use for the busy clinician, key clinical points are summarized at the end of each chapter, and a glossary of important concepts and terminology is also included. The text will be valuable for psychiatric residents, psychoanalytic candidates and faculty, and graduate students who would benefit from a quick and concise review of the developmental trajectory.

The publication of this volume at this time appears particularly auspi cious. Biological, psychological, and social change is greater during the pubertal years than at any other period since infancy. While the past two decades have witnessed a virtual explosion of productive research on the first years of life, until recently research on adolescence, and particularly on puberty and early adolescence, has lagged substantially behind. This book provides encouraging evidence that things are changing for the better. Considered separately, the individual chapters in this book include important contributions to our growing knowledge of the biological mechanisms involved in pubertal onset and subsequent changes, as well as of the psychological and social aspects of these changes, both as con sequences and determinants. In this regard, the book clearly benefits from the breadth of disciplines represented by the contributors, includ ing developmental endocrinology, adolescent medicine, pediatrics, psy chology, and sociology, among others.