Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Adolescents

This is, ultimately, a book about important details of human experience. Through its exploration of work with college students in a college psychological service setting, this book succeeds at its ambitious task of illuminating all human developmental experience with both clarity and profundity. Weaving together a well-chosen and soundly integrated range of psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, existential-humanistic, and pragmatic approaches, with an accessible Interpersonal-Relational sensibility, this book contributes cutting edge thought and practical guidance on working with this always-compelling, often fraught, adolescent-through-young-adult, college student population.

The authors’ experience and wisdom in working with college students while resourcefully engaging with the structures and systems within which this work occurs shines throughout this readable and reflection-inspiring volume. Intellectual, yet not intellectualized, this book offers a comprehensive course of study in the challenges and opportunities of engaging in psychotherapeutic consultation with college students, a group whose utilization of psychological services has been steadily increasing over the past quarter century.

This scholarly yet accessible book will be essential reading for psychotherapy and college counseling trainees, early career professionals and senior clinicians, supervisors and administrators alike.

Anton H. Hart - FABP, FIPA

Rosenbaum and Webb have produced a remarkable work of scholarship. Drawing upon semiotics, existential philosophy, attachment theory, and Lacanian, interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, they have woven together a highly sophisticated, but eminently readable, theoretical foundation upon which rests their understanding of psychotherapy as a collaborative and affirming undertaking through which therapists help patients uncover the "multitudes within" in order to live more authentic and fulfilled lives. The authors pay special attention to late adolescence and emerging adulthood, but in a refreshing departure from the familiar and easy logic of a rigid sequence of developmental steps toward the consolidation of identity, they offer instead a view of development as a richly textured, lifelong, and always incomplete journey. For all its erudition, this book is a also a highly pragmatic guide to addressing a range of challenging clinical problems, trauma and suicidal behaviors among them, sure to benefit even the most experienced of therapists, and especially those working in college mental health settings. A true marvel!

Richard J. Eichler -Executive Director of Counseling & Psychological Services at Columbia University

Taking a fresh look at late adolescence and young adulthood, Philip Rosenbaum and Rick Webb address the core dynamic issues that emerge during this crucial developmental period. Using Lacan, Erikson, object relations and existential theories as a wide theoretical framework, they delineate the central issues with which therapists working with this population contend (constructive and destructive processes, suicide, trauma, relating to otherness, and tribalism).

Theoretically sophisticated, thoughtful, and scholarly, Rosenbaum and Webb move between the theoretical and the clinical, always retaining an overarching theoretical frame that allows the reader to discern the source(s) of the therapist’s interventions. This book is a must read for clinicians working with this population.

Joyce Slochower - Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY; faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program. She is author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; & 2014).

Rick Webb and Phil Rosenbaum have given the world of counseling of college students an erudite and practically useful coverage of how psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not just a tool for treating different clinical cases but an ally that makes the guidance of student development possible. This is a rare focus in both psychoanalysis and in college level education—much needed as the future of the students is what matters most in the humanistic future of our Society.

Jaan Valsiner - Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University; Denmark Foreign Member, Estonian Academy of Sciences