TimesLiterarySupplement Review

"Three new books propose strategies to set damaged children and teenagers back on the track to maturity. While two of them cover familiar ground in worthy but unoriginal ways, the third blasts an exciting new route to understanding the process of human resilience. . . .

It is resilience that Stuart T. Hauser, Joseph P. Allen and Eve Golden examine in their study of recovery among a group of adolescents so disturbed that they had to be confined to the locked wards of a residential psychiatric hospital. . . .

Instead of focusing on the broad dimensions of risk and protection – genetic endowment, parenting, opportunity, and the social issues of money, education and status – they ask why resilient capacities develop in certain children, how they work and what we can do to nurture them. This liberating shift allows an imaginative drive into the psychological processes by which people can negotiate adversity. . . .

Out of the Woods marks several points of wide-ranging significance. First, it confirms that qualitative analysis of a small number of narratives can make a huge impact on psychological theory, as long as the right questions are asked and the material is assessed with a fresh ear. Second, it shows the personal narratives we all engage in are parts of a continuing effort to make sense of life, as well as a source of renewal and growth. Potentially exciting, too, in this study of resilient teenagers is the new angle it provides on the so-called talking cure. The curative powers come not from the expert who claims to hold the master key to interpretation, as in psychoanalytic theory, but from the patient who hones his or her skills of reflection, understanding and revision. This may explain why some psychotherapy is effective, even though the underlying theory is flawed, and why some psychotherapy is destructive, even though some of the underlying theory is correct: what matters is whether the psychotherapist’s interpretations expand or diminish personal narratives. When we compare this approach to narrative with the crude model used by Batmanghelidjh, who argues that “talking through a problem is like releasing steam from a kettle that has been boiling,” we can see how far Hauser and Allen have brought us."