Management of the Assaultive Adolescent

Evaluation and treatment of the assaultive adolescent is an important but difficult process. From a psychodynamic perspective, the author reviews factors associated with adolescent violence, including alcohol and substance use, depression and suicidality, overstimulation, sociocultural and family ambience, property damage, threats of violence, and alexythymia. Management and treatment issues are surveyed, such as the necessity to recognize that in some adolescents violence erupts not from narcissitic rage but from strong wishes for affectionate contact. Violent adolescents have little awareness of an inner psychological world, cannot name affects or differentiate one from another, and often confuse thought, feeling, and deed. In psychodynamic treatment, adolescents are helped to experience affect as part of themselves and to develop the capacity to manage affect and use it as a basis for communication and self-understanding.