Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy by J. Scott Rutan, Walter N. Stone, and Joseph J. Shay (review)

Abstract

issn 0362-4021 © 2016 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter 2016 361 1 Correspondence should be addressed to Ed Elder, MDiv, MHS, LMHC, LMFT, 19 West 34th Street, Suite 1200, New York, NY 10001. E-mail: edwardelder@msn.com. Book Review Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy, 5th edition. By J. Scott Rutan, Walter N. Stone, and Joseph J. Shay. New York: Guilford Press, 2014, 465 pp. Reviewed by Ed Elder1 I still have a copy of the first edition of Rutan and Stone’s Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy on my shelf. Though at the time it was not called the first edition. And I still find it useful to refer to much that is written there. This latest edition is obviously much more comprehensive than that first edition, which was a slim 222 pages long. While many of us have gotten thicker over the years, few of us have put on such impressive, important, and in-depth weight as these later editions have. But then, this is what one would expect of three such impressive authors. Rutan is a Distinguished Fellow and past president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA). He also founded the Center for Group Psychotherapy at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School and cofounded the Boston Institute of Psychotherapy. Stone is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He also is a Distinguished Fellow and past president of AGPA. Shay is a staff psychologist at the joint McLean/Massachusetts General Hospital. He also has an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and serves on the faculty of three other training institutes. Across editions, the authors have stayed with the same general structure of their textbook. They begin with a discussion of the role of groups in today’s society and move to a history of group therapy (theory and practice). This is followed by three chapters dealing with the psychology and metapsychology of group work (group dynamics, therapeutic factors, mechanism of change). Only after the reader has gotten a firm grounding in the theory of group dynamics and process do the authors shift to address the more nitty-gritty aspects of our work. In these three chapters, they extensively deal with how to form a group, select patients, and prepare patients 362 elder for the group itself. Once that is taken care of, they move on to issues around the role of the group therapist, the beginning phase of the group, and leadership of the group. The next four chapters take on a diversity of concepts: working with affect in the group, a case presentation with commentary, difficult groups/patients, and time-limited groups. The final chapter, as one would expect, takes on the issue of termination in group. And finally, as in all their editions, there is a FAQ section that is extremely helpful. It hardly needs to be stated that this book could serve as the foundational text of any training program in group psychotherapy and probably does serve that function in many programs. The first chapters introduce the reader to the many different ways mental health has been constructed over the years, from “hysterics” in the Victorian era to “narcissists” in the modern era. While a philosophy of psychology course would want to add more readings to flesh out this section, it opens the door to ideas that begin to shift our work out of the domain of the all-knowing therapist into the more relational perspective shared by these authors. The chapter titled “The History of Small-Group Theory and Practice” gives an excellent overview of most of the major theorists who have dealt extensively with group therapy. Some of the theorists were less well known to me (e.g., Ezriel, 1973, whose work I now want to explore) or are not discussed much anymore (or not often enough), such as Whitaker and Liebermann (1964). But each subsection develops these theorists’ ideas clearly and succinctly and (in my case at least) makes the reader want to find out more. One impressive aspect of the book as a whole is just how well most of these theorists’ works will be used throughout the...