The Visible and Invisible Group: Two Perspectives on Group and Group Process. By Yvonne Agazarian & Richard Peters. London:  Routledge. £14.95 paperback. Pp.  292.

There is, it seems, a problem in writing about psychotherapeutic groups in that most of the books on this subject are turgidly over-complicated and theoretically top-heavy, losing in the process the liveliness and power that those of us working in the field associate with group work. This phenomenon seems to derive from two sources. The first is the need to establish group psychotherapy as a serious psychotherapeutic discipline comparable to psychoanalysis. The second, and in my view most important, is the need to alleviate the anxieties of being overwhelmed by the complexity and primitive power of the group material for the conductors of groups. However, instead of holding fast to the experience of the group by remaining close to the clinical material to build up solid theoretical constructs, writers on this subject take flight into dehumanising theoretical concepts, diagrams, and complicated notational systems.

This book is of this genre, although it seems to have started out with the good intention of understanding the more personal and emotional influences in a group by stating that some comprehensive model of personality is essential for the effective use of group psychotherapy — in this case psychoanalysis.

Since Malan's work showed that the exclusive focusing on group dynamics in group psychotherapy denied the possibility of individual growth, making patients feel dehumanised, group therapists have been struggling with the problem of how to work on individual development through group process, knowing that a solution cannot be found by simply doing psychoanalysis of individuals in a group setting.

These authors suggest that the group has two aspects, the ‘visible’ seen in all the complexity of interactions hiding the structure and motivations of an ‘invisible’