ABSTRACT
Marie has given a very clear account of the normative development of aggression in childhood, with some vivid clinical material about a boy whose development went off track, leading him to enact in very aggressive ways until his anxieties could be worked through in psychotherapy. My task is to extend the theme into adolescence, and then I want to focus on a concept pertinent to untransformed aggression: the core complex. My interest in aggression was stimulated in the Portman Clinic Violence Research Group under the leadership of Mervin Glasser, and I will use material from one of my Portman Clinic patients, an adolescent boy, to illustrate how thinking about the core complex can help with understanding and working with a violent patient. I will begin with the impact of the adolescent process.
