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During the past two decades thousands of patients have been treated by group therapy: adult neurotics and psychotics, service men with traumatic neuroses and battle fatigue, children with behavior problems and their mothers. Many widely varying techniques are included in the term 'group therapy' all of which have been able to produce improvements in a large proportion of cases treated. To discover wherein lay the efficacy of this type of treatment, forty different groups have been studied.
Most of the therapists of these groups attributed their success to education of the group members and permissiveness of the group atmosphere. By 'education' some meant learning psychology and physiology with reference to the patients' symptoms, some, insight gained by the patients, and others, the knowledge that similar psychic conflicts are endured by all members of the group. The feeling of permissiveness which pervades these groups is the logical outcome of such enlightenment.
These group therapists, however, ignore two fundamentals, first, that neurotic manifestations arise from unconscious conflicts usually originating in an unresolved Oedipus situation, and second, Freud's observation that when an individual becomes part of a group his unconscious mental processes tend to dominate his conscious processes (1). Thus education and permissiveness, acting only upon the rational part of the mind, do not touch the source of the neurotic symptoms; nor are education and permissiveness at their most effective in a group when the rational part of the mind is less in evidence than usual. These factors may, however, act upon the ego to produce such superficial changes as the suppression of anxiety in the face of reassurance and a better adaptation to society