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High risk adolescents: An investigation of object relations and social functioning
Abstract
Researchers and clinicians alike have struggled with limited success to understand and treat the most troubled adolescents of our time, those who have been variously described as delinquent, conduct disordered, or aggressive. The very nature of their disruptiveness has sometimes obscured their complex psychological problems, yet psychoanalytic object relations theory provides a rich framework for understanding the interplay of intrapsychic factors and overt symptoms in producing the phenomena of conduct disturbance. The self and object relations of 19 conduct disturbed adolescents were compared to those of 15 nondisturbed adolescents via the analysis of data from the Thematic Apperception Test. Conduct disturbed adolescents demonstrated greater levels of impairment on four dimensions of object relations, measured with the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (Westen, Lohr, Silk, Kerber, & Goodrich, 1985): Complexity of Representations of People, Affect Tone of Relationship Paradigms, Capacity for Emotional Investment and Moral Standards, and Understanding of Social Causality. Impairments in object relations were related to teacher assessments of conduct problems but were unrelated to self-reported externalizing symptoms or relationship problems, suggesting that a combination of objective reports and assessments of intrapsychic relational constructs may be particularly useful in understanding adolescents with conduct disturbances. A model based on observed symptomatology and object relations effectively predicted membership in the conduct disturbed and nondisturbed groups.
Subject Area
Clinical psychology|Social psychology|Public policy
Recommended Citation
Murphy, Robert A, "High risk adolescents: An investigation of object relations and social functioning" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9639007.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9639007