Überlegungen zum Stellenwert der analytischen Gruppentherapie angesichts der „Gesellschaft der Singularitäten“ (Reckwitz)

Abstract

After a phase of founding and arrangement in the sixties and seventies the demand for analytic group-psychotherapy decreased in the middle of the eighties and in the beginning of the nineties. The author links this development to the rupture of the epoch in the sixties and seventies – described by the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz – and to the increase of the late modern cultural ideal of the (limitless) self-unfolding and the self-optimisation. It is illustrated, how this cultural ideal gives specially people with a narcissistic vulnerability the possibility for docking to, and inverse, how the stabilisation of this cultural ideal just is carried out from these people. The overburdening of the subjects with their psychical and physical manifestations, resulted of this context, is illustrated. The affect of shame is looked as the central and leading affect for the society of the limitless self-unfolding. For the author it is a substantial reason for the reduction of the demand for an analytic group-therapy. Against this trend the author highlights the rising neccessity of the therapeutic (and non-therapeutic) application of the group-analysis in our late modern society. He represents the analytic therapy group as an important space, in which social and individual conflicts, also in the domain of social and individual ideals, are experienced as reciprocal influencing and as workable in a group-analytic process. The importance of the non-therapeutic group-analytic activity is illustrated in the last section in the context of the many phenomenons of disruption and splitting in the society.