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Leslie Rosenthal has produced a definitive text on group psychotherapy, which will be the standard against which future books on the subject should be measured. Not only has he covered every aspect of treatment in groups but he has also integrated his own psychoanalytic experience and the total literature in the group field. There is full coverage of group therapy from its precursors, , , , to its pioneers, , , , and into the contemporary era.
Rosenthal's special achievement is his demonstration of how psychoanalytic principles can be applied to the treatment of groups, and he traces the very beginnings of this movement to Louis Wender in 1930. Rosenthal captures the essence of psychoanalytic therapy through his masterful utilization of the concept of resistance as applied to the functioning of a therapeutic group as a unit. He covers the concept of resistance as introduced by Freud in Studies on Hysteria and continually refined since that time, and he demonstrates how each individual in group participates in a group resistance, which must then be addressed in group fashion by the therapist. Rosenthal deals with the screening and selection of group members, and he indicates how a readiness for group treatment or a resistance to group may be discerned in the initial interview.
The pièce de resistance (forgive the pun) of this volume consists of innumerable vignettes illustrating not only each type of resistance but also the therapist's mode of resolving (or sometimes failing to resolve) that particular resistance. The book has a clinical richness that is unlikely to be surpassed.