ABSTRACT
This is a chapter from August Aichhorn’s seminal work, Wayzvard Youth, first published in 1935, for which Sigmund Freud provided a foreword reminding us that the three impossible professions are teaching, healing, and governing. Aichhorn was a teacher, but he also had considerable skill as a clinician, and his theoretical understanding of an idealizing narcissistic transference in this paper is outstanding. Through a series of vignettes, he shows the importance of establishing such a transference, if possible, during the first contacts with a juvenile delinquent. Control and authority are paramount in his treatment, but they are invoked to confront and interpret, not to castigate. Aichhorn’s sensitivity to the grandiose mask of the antisocial youth, the latter’s strong unconscious desire for an idealizing transference and dependency, and his resistance, stood alone as a guide to treatment in the psychoanalytic writings of his time.
