The author, referring to techniques and theoretical formulations developed by A. Aichhorn and H. Kohut, offers case histories of several delinquent teenagers treated as inpatients at a research unit of the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute. He then discusses the cases, focusing on disturbances in the development of narcissism in these patients. He views their grandiose, manipulative behavior as defense against fragmentation of fragile egos; as defensive regression to a period of early pathological fixation when impulse and action, self and nonself are undifferentiated. He describes the difficulties of analytic treatment with adolescents who seek omnipotence in the same therapist whom they relentlessly attempt to deceive.