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Even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, the satisfaction of an instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment… owing to its old wishes for omnipotence.11
Concern about homicidal and violent behavior in children and adolescents has been reflected in attempts to study them from statistical, developmental and psychodynamic points of view. In the Ego and the Id,1A Freud related criminal behavior in youths to a powerful sense of unconscious guilt which is primarily Oedipal in origin. He later stated in his preface to Aichhorn's Wayward Youth2 that neither juvenile delinquents nor criminals have the fully developed psychic apparatus that is essential for psychoanalysis. Glover3 saw delinquent criminal behavior as a series of hostile attacks on the environment that were motivated by the delinquents’ strong unconscious need for punishment. A homicidal assault could thereby represent both an attack on unrecognized persecutors and a mechanism for the alleviation of guilt, as well as an unconscious demand for punishment.
Another early psychoanalytic view of criminal behavior stressed anal character traits involving a spiteful rejection of societal norms and diminished superego control over id-derived antisocial activities.4 Even though an inquiry into the personality construction of adolescents who commit violently assaultive acts is essential for treatment, little attention has been paid to the early pre-Oedipal predisposing events. Aside from the influence of the sociocultural milieu of the youth gang, what are the psychic events that predispose an adolescent or child to overtly express a murderous rage? Of what importance can psychotherapy be in reducing the possibility that an adolescent who has murdered will commit further acts of violence? The purpose of the present paper will be to review the studies that bear light on this issue and to focus on early object relations phenomena. The re