Abstract
This paper attempts to describe three kinds of adolescent crisis in contemporary British writer Ian McEwan’s short stories collection: First Love, Last Rites, and look for feasible solutions from the perspective of Erich Fromm’s theory of love. The lack of parent care and love is often the cause of these adolescents who lack a sense of security and existence. This paper analyzes a few specific characters in the collection and tries to explain the relationship between parents’ love and adolescents crisis, hoping to find a proper solution to the crisis and help the smooth transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Keywords   adolescent   crisis   parent love  

   本文采取艾•弗罗姆的《爱的艺术》一书中的相关理论来解释当代英国作家伊恩•麦克尤恩作品《最初的爱情，最后的仪式》中青少年在成长中遇到的三种危机和解决办法。小说中的青少年常常因缺乏正常的父母，造成感情纽带的缺失，从而使他们缺乏安全感和存在感，进而导致一些社会悲剧的发生。本论文拟通过分析该小说集中几个具体人物形象，解释父母之爱与青少年成长危机之间的关系，以期能为当今社会中的问题少年寻找到一些正确的心理排解途径，促进青少年顺利过度到成人阶段。

关键词  青少年   危机   父母之爱

1 Introduction
Ian McEwan is the post-modern British author of twelve novels, several collections of short stories, plays, screenplays, and an oratorio. His fictions are organized                             around a number of sociological, political and moral concerns, all of which are played out on the canvas of the family. The lack of traditional family unit, usually, contributes to the crisis of adolescents when they deal with the society.

McEwan understands fiction as a kind of crucible in which readers seek to examine the human condition, and as such, to come to know themselves. He is interested in examining the choices people make, and the consequences of those choices. As adolescence is vital time to make abundant choices he chooses adolescents as main characters. This paper explores the outcomes of adolescents’ crisis, trying to find out the real reasons behind these outcomes as well as the solutions by applying Erich Fromm’s theory of love. Erich Fromm is a German-American Jewish social psychologist, psychoanalyst, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. His most popular book, The Art of Loving, is an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulates and complements the theoretical principles of human nature. In this book, Fromm presents love as a skill that can be taught and developed. He rejects the idea of loving as something magical and mysterious that cannot be analyzed and explained. This paper intends to achieve such a goal that when facing with crises of adolescents, both adolescents and adults may come up with some good solutions.