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This is a fascinating and important book. Originally published in 1975, it has been translated from the French as part of the International Library of Group Psychotherapy & Group Process, edited by two British psychoanalysts, Malcolm Pines and Earl Hopper. It brings to a wider readership the ideas of a powerful team of French psychoanalysts working with groups in recent years.
Didier Anzieu is Professor of Psychology at the University of Paris (Nanterre). A practising psychoanalyst, he is Vice-President of the Psycho-Analytical Association of France and a former President of the French Society of Group Psychotherapy. His ideas developed during over twenty years of using groups for training and consultative work as well as for therapy. He takes a profoundly psychoanalytic view of groups, summed up well in his concluding chapter. He states, for example, that human groups are the consequence of projections, and that in terms of psychological dynamics the groups is a dream. He adds to Freud's three illusions in Totem and Taboo (religious, artistic and philosophical), a fourth, that of the group illusion. He stresses the importance of rules in both psychoanalysis and groups in introducing individuals into the symbolic dimension.
Anzieu has some very interesting things to say about the differences between individual and group unconscious processes, between the 'vertical' and 'horizontal' unconscious. For example he believes that the only way a group can protect itself and make use of external stimulation and the wishes and drives with which it is cathected by its members, is to fabricate an overarching group psychical apparatus on top of those of the individuals composing it. This is reminiscent of Foulkes's idea of the group matrix, and Anzieu does in fact refer to Foulkes's idea of resonance. He writes of group phantasies produced by circulation of individual phantasies among group members, but also points out that the group itself produces particular effects o