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What is it like to do psychoanalytic psychotherapy in a group? How does it work when the analytic couple becomes a three or more? What happens to the analytic conversation? To transference? What happens to intimacy and belonging? What happens to the individual in the group and to the group in the individual? What do these ideas have to do with working in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in general? Are these ideas relevant to the living of everyday life and the promotion of living and seeking, more than just surviving?
Nick Barwick and Martin Weegman have written a rich and readable contribution to the theory and practice of analytic psychotherapy in groups, and also outside of groups.
There are many aspects to this book. For one, it is an impressive work of scholarship and theoretical integration. In his prologue, Nick Barwick presents his intention of writing a ‘… concise introduction to the field of group analysis, organised and referenced in such a way that readers looking for a fulsome one-stop meal will find sufficient fare, while others, wishing to explore further will find ample signposts of where to go’ (p. xix). Barwick and Weegman have certainly accomplished this intention.
Group analysis is a form of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and is capable of informing individual professional work in the general field of mental health, as well as offering an alternative or addition to individual work for many patients and clients. Group analysis is particularly good at unpicking and integrating difference and blocks to communication that might otherwise become polarised. Barwick and Weegman illustrate this characteristic of group analysis by figuratively putting a multiplicity of psychoanalysts, group analysts and others into a very large and diverse imagined group and facilitating a conversation between them. So, although presenting their book as a review of the group analytic literature, Barwick and Weegman also do an important job of pulling together and integrating idea