The Negative Transference in the Treatment of Juvenile Delinquents

This work was begun in 1969 in an attempt to study juvenile delinquents and to explore the feasibility of developing a hospital treatment program which would both assess and treat their behavior and their psychopathology, consistent with the author's commitment to teach, do research, and provide service in the public sector within a psychoanalytic framework. Trends such as community psychiatry and psychopharmacology have gained wide support because they would appear to save money, and, as a result, patients in the public sector are often denied the benefits of dynamic psychiatry and a dynamically oriented psychotherapy. This is particularly so when a serious problem like violence confronts society, or when society can readily rationalize unacceptable behavior, such as juvenile delinquency, as the result of a number of social rather than psychological factors (Marohn, 1979).

Research results have been published in The Psychological World of the Juvenile Delinquent by Offer, Marohn, and Ostrov (1979) and in Juvenile Delinquents: Psychodynamic Assessment and Hospital Treatment (Marohn et al., 1980), which describes the hospital treatment program. In eleven years, several hundred male and female adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 have been referred because of