Response to Scheidlinger: Group Therapy Remains a Psychoanalytic “No No”

Abstract

I very much appreciate and agree with Dr. Scheidlinger’s reflections regarding the training of clinicians and his advocacy of early immersion in group process and group therapy. His letter calls to mind the powerful institutional resistances to group experience, specifically psychoanalytic institutions. Jaques (1955) wrote a half century ago about “how much institutions are used by individual members to reinforce individual mechanisms of defence against anxiety and in particular against recurrence of the early paranoid and depressive anxieties” (p. 478). While it is increasingly recognized that authoritarian pathology in these oligarchic and parochial organizations mitigates against creative work, I have not heard of any psychoanalytic institute subjecting itself to self-study or to an in-house process group. In his recent critique of psychoanalytic education, Kernberg (2000) acknowledged the “striking avoidance” of studying the essential literature of small and large groups. He did not go so far as to suggest structured and ongoing group experience among his proposed solutions to the “regressive idealizations and split-off paranoiagenesis . . . that haunt psychoanalytic institutions” (p. 113; see also Kirsner, 2000). Dr. Scheidlinger’s remarks reflect my personal experience: Most psychoanalytic group therapists prefer and recommend combined therapy; however, most psychoanalytic institutions