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Group therapy has made use of psychoanalytic concepts since its inception. This union has produced no satisfactory, comprehensive theory for group therapy nor has a viable alternative perspective gained ascendancy in that field. Psychoanalysis, continually faced with alternative models of the mind, is currently faced with unprecedented conceptual confusion. This situation has been accelerated by clinical investigations of 'borderline' and 'narcissistic' patients which have produced new models of the personality and its development. It is in this context of alternative and competing models of psychopathology that the volume under review appears. This book is the sixth in the monograph series of the American Group Psychotherapy Association. The editors took on the ambitious task of addressing the group therapeutic treatment of 'difficult' borderline and narcissistic patients. They divided the monograph into four parts, each with a brief orienting summary: theory, clinical contributions, inpatient groups, and countertransference.
The theory section contains papers by Saul Tuttman on the application of Kernberg's and Kohut's work to the group treatment of borderline and narcissistic disorders; Malcolm Pines on Foulksian group analytic psychotherapy with borderlines conceptualized by the work of Kernberg, Kohut, Jacobson and Akhtar & Thompson; Sigmund W. Karterud on the theories of Bion and Kohut in relation to group dynamics; William E. Powles on Whitaker & Lieberman's group focal conflict theory's application to diagnosis and treatment of borderlines; Jerome W. Kosseff's theory of 'anchoring the self' derived from the work of Winnicott and Erikson and applied to group treatment.
The section on Clinical Contributions contains papers by Eugenio Gaburri on clinical material involving thought disorder and identity disturbances in a group confronting loss from the conceptual perspective of Klein and Bion; Bennett E. Roth on a group of patients who did not meaningfully