Group Psychoanalysis: A Panel

This panel on group psychoanalysis is based on clinical experience gained during the last three years from psychoanalytic work with fifteen groups of maximally eight patients of both sexes. They met once a week for one-and-a-half hour sessions.

The term “group psychoanalysis” is used to characterize that form of group therapy which has as its goals not merely socialization, catharsis, abreaction, relief from anxiety or reduction of symptoms, but emotional insight leading to change of the character structure in the direction of healthy growth, self-realization and constructive relations with others. The goals of group psychoanalysis, in short, are seen as essentially the same as those of individual analysis. Only further research will determine how far group psychoanalysis in itself can and does lead patients on the road to self-realization.

Karen Horney, on whose theory and therapy our project is based, said, “Group psychoanalysis is not only a way of reaching more people but it is a peculiar kind of therapy with problems of its own. These problems are of three kinds: advantages, difficulties and dangers, and limitations.”

Indeed, group psychoanalysis is different from individual analysis not merely in a quantitative sense, which would make it merely a more diluted form of individual therapy. Group psychoanalysis is different in quality. A new medium is created: the group. And the group itself becomes a highly important dynamic and therapeutic factor with specific constructive and specific retarding effects on the therapeutic process.

Group and individual psychoanalysis are in no way mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they may interact in a process of mutual fertilization. Not only does the work in group psychoanalysis often become solidified by the addition of individual sessions, but individual psychoanalysis in certain stages of relative stagnation may become vitalized and mobilized by the patient's participation in a group.

Our interest in group psychoanalysis is c