Care and Control: Working Alliance Among Adolescents in Authoritarian Settings

This article reviews the literature published in the last 20 years on working alliance in adolescents involuntarily enrolled in intervention programs. Firstly, Bordin's adaptation of the concept of working alliance to adolescent populations is discussed. This is followed by an analysis of the main results of empirical studies on helping relationships in authoritarian settings. Finally, the results of these studies are used as the basis for a multidimensional (personal, interpersonal, contextual) model of working alliance in young people in authoritarian settings. A key conclusion of this article is that differences in intervention context are essential to the understanding of the establishment of working alliance in young people. A dyadic vision of working alliance (patient/therapist) does not appear to significantly advance the theory of clinical practice.