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The ‘antigroup’ is a concept that Morris Nitsun has developed for describing and understanding the negative disruptive, destructive elements that threaten the functioning of the group. It evolved out of his extensive experience as a group analyst and has already had a major impact on the theory and practice of group psychotherapy. Here he extends it also to non-clinical group contexts including organizations, staff groups, experiential training groups, the family and our culture at large. Interplay between creative and destructive tendencies is central to the group analytic process, and a theme which he develops beautifully is the transformational potential of antigroup tendencies and their contribution to aesthetic depth.
In more ‘pathological’ situations, though, the psychotherapy group can feel gripped by countertherapeutic processes that are insidious and hard to understand or seem to have come out of the blue, for example, sudden negative therapeutic reactions, spiralling destructiveness or prolonged negativistic impasse. Bion's description of ‘group mentality’ evokes images of the group as a morass of ‘anonymous contributions’, primitive impulses estranged from their original sources through projective identification. As Morris Nitsun shows, this reflects the complexity of the group process but also the need for coherent, clinically based conceptual frameworks for guiding the group therapist in this challenging area.
This book develops such a framework. It shows that it is possible and important to identify and understand these destructive processes more clearly. Through extensive clinical illustrations Morris Nitsun shows how this can enhance the group therapist's capacity for containing, limiting, integrating and harnessing the creative potential of otherwise inexplicable group destructive forces. This is timely as group therapists work increasingly with borderline and psychotic patients and in settings such as the NHS where disturbance and destructive process