Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Adolescents

Book excerpt: In this book, Philip Rosenbaum and Richard Webb consider the complexities of working as counselors and psychotherapists for college students, and offer a broad and detailed account of the developmental issues essential to understanding adolescent experience. Drawing on existentialism, cultural psychology and relational and object relations theories in psychoanalysis, this book offers a perspective that is sensitive to both clinical concerns and the broader context of college counseling and working with adolescents. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of adolescent identities through a relationship with "otherness," and several considerations are explored as a result. These include the emergence and reconciliation of destructive feelings, suicidal phenomenology and the effects of trauma. By taking a fresh look at clinical developmental theories as they affect adolescents and young adults, Rosenbaum and Webb provide a view of college-student development that is theoretically rich and clinically applicable in a way that warrants renewed appreciation and practice among counselors, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts working with college-age clients.