Characteristics and new trends in group psychotherapy.

Abstract

The therapeutic group includes within one framework both the reality principle and the pleasure principle and therefore furthers insight in transference and narcissistic fusion tendencies as well as social learning. The individual psychotherapeutic setting, however, is a more protective one, not representing social reality and by this not enabling the patient to gain social experience within the therapeutic situation. Group psychotherapy leads by means of the amplifying effect of the group to a deep emotional and psychotherapeutic commitment of the members. A group dream, in which one or members or the group as a whole appear, may be activated and show to the concerned individual and eventually to others unconscious infantile or actual conflicts mobilized by the group. From the sociological point of view, the group represents an interactional network. From the psychological point of view, however, the feelings and the thoughts of each individual in the group situation are decisive. Therefore, it is important to pay attention not only to the group as a whole but preponderantly to the participating individuals with their unconscious expectations and their behaviour in the Here and Now of the group. The complex interactions in the group permit manifold transferences and by this analytic working‐through but lead also to a deconditioning and reconditioning process which takes the patients away from old, neurotic to new, open patterns of behaviour.