Treatment of Adolescent Drug Abusers

This paper represents a distillation of our thoughts and discussions for the past few years about the treatment of drug abuse in adolescence. In an earlier paper, which was a systems view of the drug problem, we wrote of the glorification of the youth culture and the acceptance of drug use as an antidote to social conformity by a part of the therapeutic community.3 In this article we are focusing on our work from the point of view of unconscious phenomenology, redefining the problem and modifying our approaches.

We are writing about clients between the ages of fourteen and twenty that we have been seeing with increasing frequency in private practice—young people who usually enter therapy for some reason other than drug use, often poor school work, and who quickly reveal their involvement with drugs. They are the young “potheads” who smoke marijuana heavily and the “experimenters” who are using hallucinogens, barbiturates, and stimulants. In contrast to the extensive literature on narcotics addiction, there is relatively little clinical writing about the young preaddictive client; this may indicate that the subject of drugs may not even be a part of the therapeutic work with adolescents. We have wondered about this apparent avoidance which has resulted in the abandonment of such work to nonprofessionals and self-help peer groups. Perhaps the abundance of literature about addiction is the result of the professional therapist's ability to scrutinize the problem with a greater degree of emotional objectivity and distance between himself and the addict. In contrast, when facing the adolescent drug abuser, the therapist sees reflections of his own confusions about drug use or even his own guilt if he has experimented