Assessing adolescents who threaten homicide in schools

Psychoanalytic and psychiatric perspectives on children who threaten to kill others are reviewed in the context of the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the problem. Converging technologies derived from a psychoanalytically informed social systems model are compared to law enforcement approaches, psychoanalytic understanding of the individual dynamics of the child, and empirical research on conduct disordered adolescents. The interdisciplinary orientation of a broadly trained community psychoanalyst allows a unique contribution when trying to distinguish adolescents who make a threat from those who pose a threat. Case vignettes are used to illustrate the hypotheses.