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This is a serious, thoughtful, and scholarly treatise which is unlikely to be read by American psychoanalysts who have stoutly maintained their resistance to interest in group psychotherapy. For those with such an interest, especially those engaged in teaching group psychotherapy, it is a valuable text with its 350 references from Abraham, K. to Zukav, G.
Parenthetically, although the comprehensive literature review is one of the strengths of this book, it is puzzling that in their evaluation of M. Klein's elaborate infantile fantasies two of the preeminent investigators of infant development from a psychoanalytic point of view, D. Stern and R. N. Emde, are never mentioned.
The goal is to combine object relations theory with drive theory into an integrated theory of psychoanalytic group psychotherapy using a systems theory model. They propose a three-dimensional groupanalytic grid (pp. 132–177) which includes three systems (intrapsychic, interactive, and group-qua-group), six developmental lines (comprehensive views of object relations and the self, affects/defenses, fantasy, identification and externalization processes, cognitive mastery, and boundaries and structure) and six group-developmental levels (from the primordial group to the self-actualizing group). Application of the grid is not very fully elaborated, although an illustration is provided.
Little attempt is made to tie the grid to clinical material. There are only 12 clinical vignettes, each less than one page. Further, they fail to articulate any of the methodological problems in making the high-level inferences that are incorporated in the grid, such as the operation of projective identification, from the clinical data that are provided by the vignettes. For example, work with patients in conjoint individual and group therapy indicates that patients consciously withhold and fail to express many thoughts and feelings while in group, though they report in individual sessions that they had experienc