On television, in the newspapers, even in textbooks of psychiatry, the teen years are portrayed as 'bad news.' Adolescents are seen as moody, rebellious, promiscuous, immature, aggressive and lazy. Their behavior is seen as getting worse as we move into the twenty first century. In fact the majority of young people have none of these objectionable characteristics. Adolescents have always been stigmatised as they are today and it is widely thought that it is 'natural' for the teens to be a 'difficult' phase of life. But it is the adult world that has created the world of adolescence and the...

Susan Isaacs' work was groundbreaking in the professional fields of education, psychoanalysis and psychology. She also had a strong influence on the way middle-class mothers brought up their young children in the pre-Spock era of the nineteen thirties in Britain by acting as an -agony aunt- answering readers' questions in the Nursery World.

This new biography of her is enriched by having access to the paperwork of the British psycho-analytic establishment; thus enabling a greater description of significant part she played in the development of the field.