Book dossier

Teenage pregnancy

by Anne L. Dean

Teenage Pregnancy: The Interaction of Psyche and Culture transcends earlier investigations by going beyond conventional research strategies to test psychodynamic theories about the formation of internal worlds. Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson and Hans Loewald, Dean not only finds empirical justification for psychodynamic theories of psychic structure, but also extends the scope and methodology of attachment research in an exciting new direction. Specifically, her analysis reveals how different kinds of attachment relationships between mothers and daughters manifest themselves in adolescence as internal working models that become the templates for interpreting, and acting upon, contradictory economic, social, and familial expectations. This volume has important theoretical implications extending beyond the phenomenon of teenage pregnancy. In demonstrating how social factors and cultural schemas interact with psychodynamic motives and structures, it has widespread applicability to social science research in general. And it offers psychodynamically oriented clinicians working with adolescents the opportunity to become better acquainted with the ways in which mother-daughter relationships gain expression in the identity choices of teenage girls.