The adolescents provided a 5-minute narrative about their mothers, which was scored for referential activity and object relations. As predicted, the abused adolescents tended to have lower levels of affect tone, including more malevolent relationship paradigms. Contrary to what was predicted, however, there were no significant differences between groups on overall measures of referential activity and object relations. The abused adolescents tended to have higher levels of two elements of referential activity (concreteness, imagery), indicating increased verbal ability to express emotional experience. While predicted correlations were found between object relations and referential activity for the nonabused group, the abused group showed higher symbolizing and verbalizing capacity, associated with more malevolent representations of relationships. The findings do not support the view that physically abused adolescents experience developmental lags, instead suggesting that they organize and use emotional and symbolizing processes differently from nonabused adolescents. The article discusses implications for treatment. Tables, references