Discussion of Seymour Boorstein's Article, A Psychoanalytic Overview of the Offender: Implications for Therapy

I am grateful to Dr. Boorstein for his elegant presentation of the psychodynamic problems confronting the therapist who works with offenders, and also for his skillful yet economic outline of the positions taken by other workers in this singularly complex area of research.

The clinician working in a closed institution has to do so in a sustained atmosphere of hidden threat: an atmosphere often intensified by the punitive implications of the institution itself as well as by staff attitudes towards the offender which the latter can cope with only by an intensification of his paranoid suspicions and in which the therapist himself may be regarded initially as simply a more subtle element in the punitive process.

In the treatment situation, as in all others, the delinquent is his own worst advocate. He brings to therapy a gamut of aggressively defeatist attitudes which weigh heavily on those who would help him. Dr. Boorstein rightly points to the therapeutic community as being one way in which this massive clinical burden can be considerably lessened.

Of particular value to me is the author's emphasis on the narcissistic quality of the delinquent personality allied with the poverty and fragmentation of internalized figures. These two factors together militate against positive regressive processes.

While agreeing with Eissler's two-phase approach to treatment, I have formed the impression from my work with delinquent adolescents that it is frequently possible for analytic work of a modified nature to run alongside firm management from the outset. No doubt this is

due to the adolescent's ability to enrich his fund of internalized figures during that mildly regressive and infantile-recapitulating phase which is typical of adolescent experience. Even comparatively superficial psychotherapy did go some way towards limiting the need to act out during the initial stages of treatment and So prevented further legal entanglement; it also avoided the imposition of harsher management