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This paper describes group therapy with institutionalized adolescents whose grandiose and exhibitionistic tendencies were too strong to allow them to be handled as in the groups described by Ackerman. At first the members were united only in avoiding the therapist and finding a basis for discussion. They approached the therapist in an assaultive or manipulative fashion, then accused him, as an officer, of mistreatment and of responsibility for their mishaps, and deluged him with requests for privileges. One value of such therapy is that it affords the delinquents an expression of hostility: by attacking their fellows, they by-pass the immobilizing fear of direct retaliation by authority. In this world, the adult males are jailers, paternal figures with only restricting, punitive attitudes. The members of the group, from twelve to twenty years old, were closer to the motor expression of their overwhelming impulses but had less social control than their peers. The therapist attempted to have them accept him as a limited, fallible human being.
In the first stages of resistance, the group tried to avoid acknowledging their need to relate to adults. Distrust of the therapist appeared in aloof politeness