Analysis of follow-up data on 123 adolescents treated over a four-year period indicates that intensive short-term residential treatment that includes emphasis on work with families, involvement in community activities, and discharge planning can be an effective means of helping youngsters with severe psychiatric disorders who have not responded to briefer or less intensive forms of psychiatric treatment.

This paper reviews the history of residential treatment, examines the central concepts that define the therapeutic modality, and shows how those concepts provide means of addressing criticisms that have been raised about it in the past and adapting residential programs to meet challenges facing them in the future.

Outcome research on residential treatment indicates that, although adolescents often improve in residential treatment, those gains are frequently lost when they return to the community. This paper examines reasons for these findings and highlights two shortcomings of many residential programs that contribute to the problem: limitations on family participation in treatment and lack of opportunities for involvement in the community. Consideration is given to ways in which the need to develop short-term residential treatment programs can provide an impetus to addressing the problem.

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This article offers a critique of traditional theories of the Rorschach as a perceptual task, proposes an alternative conception of the task as one of visual representation, and demonstrates the manner in which the latter theory provides a superior explanation of the distinctive quality of the Rorschach stimuli, the ways in which participants and examiners understand the test, the assumptions underlying Rorschach scoring, and the manner in which young children master the test.

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After describing the manner in which the integration of psychoanalysis and developmental psychology became a central problem for ego psychology, the author examines the conditions that make it possible for new research and theory in developmental psychology to contribute to a revolution in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. They include: (1) the emergence of a state of "crisis" in American psychoanalysis centering on questions of the nature of early development and how it can be known; (2) the explosive growth of developmental research on early childhood dealing with issues at the heart of that crisis; and (3) the presence of a new generation of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented researchers capable of bringing that research to bear on those issues.