Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I have read with appreciation the recent paper by J. and D. Scharff in the December 2017 issue (IJP: 98: 1619–1639) on the “Group Affective Model,” (GAM) in the training of psychotherapists and analytic candidates. Their methodology seems like a supple response to Bolognini’s (2014) entreaty that psychoanalysts consider a “4th pillar” to their tri-partite Eitingon model of training analysis, supervision and didactic courses.

By having student therapists and analytic candidates alike undergo “group affective” experiences in groups where they emotionally process their responses to analytic readings, there seems to be new possibilities of enlivening the overall trainee experience in didactic courses—as the Scharffs’ small group examples demonstrate.

As it turns out, their methodology (honed after many years of experience in Washington, DC and abroad) also turns out to be a felicitous match for one deployed by a group of IPA-affiliated graduate analysts who have gathered in Los Angeles for annual meetings over the past 3 years. A group of 70 (primarily American) analysts get together to discuss the clinical work of Wilfred Bion, striking an inter-regional dimension by inviting UK analysts to discuss his work with our group. In the last 2 years, we have also added a comparative aspect, where we have examined the work of Bion in connection with the clinical ideas of D.W. Winnicott.

Just last year, we also experimented by having a Tavistock-based, Group Relations, all day conference just prior to a traditional academic 3-day conference weekend. We have continued this experiment into a second year and are pleased that the results now appear in the May issue of the British Journal of Psychotherapy (Aguayo et al., 2018).

While our methods developed independently of the Scharffs' GAM, we are pleased to report some intriguing similarities, a case of what Thomas Kuhn has termed “simultaneous discovery,” where researchers light upon similar findings in two separate geogra