Fifty years of analytic group psychotherapy: A personal retrospective

Abstract

It is a great honor to have been invited to give the Asya Kadis Memorial Lecture in Analytic Group Psychotherapy. This is especially so since the joint recipient is my highly esteemed colleague of many years, Dr. Alexander Wolf. Asya Kadis was a vibrant, distinguished, and caring analyst, teacher, and administrator of the Analytic Group Psychotherapy Department. She imbued all with whom she came in contact with her enthusiastic zeal. I met Asya for the first time in the 1950s when Helen Durkin requested me to substitute for her as a leader of a seminar she could not attend. Asya sat in the class and, when it was over, ran up, hugged me in her inimitable manner, as she introduced herself to me and added decisively, You must become a member of our staff! And who could refuse Asya? Even though I was still working at the Brooklyn Child Guidance Center and heading the Group Therapy Department at the New Rochelle Guidance Center. And so I am here today to give you a personal retrospective of Fifty Years of Analytic Group Psychotherapy. Marvin Aronson suggested that I describe the field when I first entered it. This suggestion reminds me of a current radio advertisement for a Caribbean hotel. A 16-year-old girl is complaining to her mother of boredom with their vacation. Her mother inquires, What are the other kids doing? The girl answers plaintively, There aren't any. This would be a good description of the field at the time, especially at child guidance clinics. It was at the Brooklyn Juvenile Protective Association, later called Brooklyn Child Guidance Center, that I met Helen Durkin and Jeannette Hirch, when we were doing our internship and being trained by John Levy, the Psychiatric Director, in his theory and method, Relationship Therapy (Levy, 1938). His approach to the treatment of children was a modified form of Freudian psychoanalysis that incorporated the Rankian concept of evaluating current attitudes and feelings and Melanie Klein's object relations theory. In those days, any form of psychoanalytic child treatment involved 4-5 visits a week. He adapted his Relationship Therapy for use on a once-a-week basis. Levy introduced the idea of treating parents of problem children when he found that psychotherapy with the child was not enough. He taught us to treat both mother and child individually and to work with the fathers if they were available. We found