The Radical Nature of Combined Psychotherapy

Abstract

The therapist’s commitment in thought and action to combined practice influences all aspects of professional life. Hence, the “radical” (or foundational): The idea as well as the shared history of combined psychotherapy are rooted within the complexities and intensities of the multiple transference-countertransferences, intrapsychic defenses, interpersonal strategies, and inevitable enactments of all members of one’s practice. Case anecdotes illustrate (a) the psycho-social impact of Establishment psychoanalysis and group analysis on the therapist; (b) the intertwining of dyadic-group experience on manifest and latent content, inference making, and interpretation; (c) how the “group” never leaves the room, that is, the salutary effects on the therapist’s thinking and clinical relationships of the idea as well as the reality of group, even with those patients not exposed to combined treatment; and (d) resistances specific to combined treatment. Combined individual-group psychoanalytic therapy is a natural fit, yet a radical extension of contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory and practice.