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All psychotherapy aims at enabling patients to achieve independence and identity. In a group, members develop emotionally to achieve distance from the leader and fight off their primitive desires to identify with him through submission and fusion. They must learn to love as reasonable and autonomous beings. A therapy group, appropriately conducted, achieves this. After anxieties have been understood and shed, good peer feelings arise.
In therapeutic groups, new members go through a phase of concern about being accepted. (Exceptions are schizophrenics, who behave like hermits.) Next, the relationship to the group resembles a mother-child symbiosis in which members begin to resent a lack of understanding and to challenge each other. This is the start of the struggle for individuation, usually accompanied by a show of hostility. Finally, the acceptance is shown by the development of coöperation and peer feelings. Hostility at this point is directed primarily toward the therapist. The countertransference of the therapist is the deciding factor in the group's being able to move from the aggressive individuation phase into the coöperative individuation phase. The therapist must realize that in the life of a group, every patient-follower at some time must become a rebel.