ABSTRACT
The emotional situation of adolescent psychotic patients has its peculiarities. The adolescent psychotic symptomatology expresses a strong hunger for relationships and a desire for containment: to hold and order to counter the patient’s chaotic experience. All adolescents lay special emphasis on their immediate experiences, yet run a high risk to surrender to them. This is why adolescents are to be viewed as especially vulnerable towards psychotic breakdowns. Drug treatment of psychotic adolescents generally follows the principles that have been established in adult psychiatry. Everyday life on a therapeutic adolescent ward requires only a few universal rules referring to the social life of the group and its interplay with the institution. Transference psychoses and psychotic countertransference reactions often seem to converge if one really commits oneself to a therapeutic relationship. It is the task of a functioning therapeutic team, with its firm organizational, and supervisory structures, to enable a continuous reflection of induced countertransference reactions, as had occurred in our case.
