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The two sessions of the meeting on group psychology were devoted respectively to a consideration of the implications for psychoanalytic theory of current study of group phenomena and to a consideration of the clinical problems implicit in concomitant group and individual treatment.
Leo Berman read a scholarly study of certain "Problems in Working Toward an Integration of Individual and Group Psychology." It is unwarranted, he noted, to believe either that more complete understanding of individual psychology will allow for understanding the group, or that it is never sound to try to conceptualize the human organism in isolation from its social environment. But while there is more and more interest in group therapy and the study of natural groups such as the family, there has been little progress toward a psychoanalytic group psychology in recent years. Berman suggests that some aspects of psychoanalytic theory, especially when exaggerated, are not encouraging to the development of group psychology which is needed.
Berman took up four theoretical issues in turn. The first of these was the value of more attention to the less structured areas of mental functioning. According to Rapaport, an emergent organization is one that has laws of its own distinct from the elements which constitute it; such emergent organizations partly control and are partly controlled by the underlying organization from which they emerge. Thus the autonomy of the ego can only be a relative autonomy; one of its crucial autonomous functions is the internalization of reality, with a consequent ideational representation of reality within the psychic apparatus.
This concept points up certain difficult theoretical problems. He discussed the question of whether there are aspects of the environment which are not the usual grist for the mill of internalization but upon which the person is dependent. He cited Hebb's observations to indicate the degree to which humans seem to be dependent upon external