Committees at Work

Dr. Maxwell Gitelson, Chairman of the Program Committee, is preparing for the midwinter meetings in December. All proposals and abstracts of papers for this meeting should be sent in by July 1st. These should be mailed to Dr. LeRoy Maeder so that he may forward them to the new Chairman of the Program Committee

Committee on Psychoanalytic Group Therapy

Dr. Leo Berman, Chairman, reports that the Committee met in New York City on December 7, 1950. Present were Drs. Joseph Abrahams, Jerome Frank, Geraldine Pederson-Krag, Florence Powdermaker, Alexander Wolf, and Leo Berman. Dr. Wolf spoke informally on problems of resistance during group psychotherapy and this stimulated considerable discussion and exchange of experiences. It was clear as the presentation and discussion went on that all present were striving to delineate group-specific manifestations of resistance, although at times it was not easy to avoid the tendency to carry over to the group situation in a rather mechanical way what we know about resistance from individual therapy.

Dr. Wolf described various types of patients who, for example, showed the following forms of resistance: a need to have exclusive possession of the parent, feeling rejected by the whole family and wanting to flee, fear of the group's judgment, talking only to the therapist and trying to change the situation into one of individual therapy, wanting to cure the entire group because of a compulsive missionary zeal, participating in the group to satisfy voyeuristic tendencies, etc. He also referred to instances in which resistances seemed less intense as compared to what one would expect in individual therapy. For example, comments concerned with analysis of defenses which come, so to speak, from one's peers, i.e., from fellow patients, are not usually warded off as vigorously as when they come from the therapist. Dr. Wolf also observed that problems of overintensive sexual transference do not come up in his groups. In t