The object of this paper is to investigate the quality of the relationship between a juvenile probationer and his/her Rogerian probation officer.
In this paper, the authors present the process of therapeutic interview with three juvenile probationers and discuss the following points.
(1) The officer’s “self-congruence” is very important and helpful for them as well as his/ her “unconditional positive regard” and “empathic understanding”.
(2) The juvenile pobationers’ negative emotions evoked in the process of transference can be understood if the officer recognizes and grasps their defence mechanisms.
(3) The therapeutic process with moderate and lasting negative transference may prevent both emotional confusion and acting-out.
It seems to be effective to assese the delin-quency from two points of view;how the delinquent is relating to his (her) society and what problems he (she) has psychologically. A method to diagnose the delinquency and discuss about the treatment using two scales was studied.
The one is the scale to measure the degree to which certain delinquent conforms to the norm or culture of the delinquent group; delinquency-infection scale. Concerning this scale, Abe’s concept of the depth of delin-quency (Abe,J.1978) was introduced.
Another is the scale of ego-stability. The delinquent having unstable ego is difficult to improve his (her) conduct tendency and thus needs the psychiatric-psychological treatment. Assesing this ego-stability, it is important to ascertain whether the adomonitions or cautions are effective.
The delinquent who is severely troubled mentally can not accept his (her) teacher’s adomonitions and such directions often causes contrary effects. In this context, this study introduced Fukushima’s concept of oedipal opposition and pre-oedipal opposition(Fuku-shima,1980), and worked out the method to understand the ego-stability.
Applying this diagnosing method using two scales to several cases, it was confirmed that this method is effective to diagnose delinquent and to refine its treatment.