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Dr. Scheidlinger has put together in this small volume, Focus on Group Psychotherapy, a series of his essays written over the past two decades. Forming the chapters of four main sections, these “essays” constitute reprints in full or in part of topical works and of theoretical discussions on group structure. Much of this subject matter has been elaborated as a means of setting it in a broader or contemporary context. The reader thus gets an overview of the many connecting links group psychotherapy has acquired over the past 40 years.
As a group psychotherapist of broad experience, Scheidlinger has had the opportunity to monitor the development of group psychotherapy from its early beginnings to the present time. A parallel development — which he also delineates and differentiates from group psychotherapy, while recognizing their commonality — is the wide variety of groups, from group dynamics or process groups to support, or what fall within “therapeutic,” groups. Dr. Scheidlinger, in the very first chapter, takes great pains to distinguish these groups, valuable as they may be within their own sphere of activity, from psychotherapy groups.
Part II, titled “Theoretical Perspectives,” opens with a chapter on “Group Process in Group Psychotherapy,” in which Scheidlinger presents a detailed account of Bion's theoretical schema of group psychology: wherein he differs from Freud, for example, on the elements and causes of panic. He discusses similarities between Bion's discussion of gratification needs satisfied by the group through analytic theory and the various identifications members in the group take.
Dr. Scheidlinger points out the fundamental levels at which groups function, noting that the group psychotherapy experience functions at two levels: “(1) a dynamic-contemporaneous level and (2) a genetic-regressive one.” Here he touches on a point of disagreement between psychoanalytic group psychotherapists and those who seek to combine the reality-testing “work” functio