Group Analysis

Beginning with a brief review of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, the authors consider the role of group treatment of trauma. Several models of groups are discussed along with available research regarding efficacy. A discussion of the special dynamics of trauma groups and important considerations for group conducting follows and the issue of vicarious traumatization for the group conductor is addressed. A short discussion regarding the need to integrate traumatized individuals back into society concludes the paper.

The terror attacks of 11 September 2001 have produced a posttraumatic effect in many workers. They have developed what the author defines as ‘Worker’s Block’, an emotional disengagement from their job. The author suggests that factors contributing to this vocational crisis include the nature of the stressor, deficits in the individual’s resiliency and the hardiness of one’s employer. From his group-centered perspective, the author discusses ways to strengthen individuals and their organizations in order to minimize the damaging effects of future attacks on the workforce.

The authors assert that one may view intractable political violence as a genre of ‘emplotted’ action in which society enacts, writes and organizes its narratives into a symbolic system and a mode of historical explanation and a configuration of group relations, which have a storytelling capacity of their own. We demonstrate that in Northern Ireland there is a constant making and narrating of history and that this repetitive and reciprocal ritual of reliving history is a means of managing a profound psychic trauma and displacement which engenders and entrenches political violence, that profoundly affects therapists and their group members.

In this paper I recount the difficulties of working with the group whose members were traumatized during the bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999. The difficulties were most present in transference-countertransference relations. The focus will be the influence of the projective identification mechanism on counter-transference, and how this mechanism is used in order to express the feelings that cannot otherwise be expressed, except for the therapist to experience them. The communications aspects of Projective Identification (PI) were evident when the group members tended to provoke certain feelings and thoughts within the therapist, trying to involve him in some kind of an acting-out and so avoid anxiety related to their feelings. Therefore it was of great importance that the therapist should observe his countertransference feelings as the way for the feelings of the group members to be registered, since they cannot be registered in any other way.

This article highlights specific and unique challenges which confront the therapist when dealing with patients suffering from the effects of trauma within a war situation - refugees, displaced persons and relatives of those who have ‘disappeared’ in war. In presenting clinical vignettes, the author focuses on war in Croatia, whilst also demonstrating how many problems are common to all those in war situations, including the therapist as well as patients, particularly problems and dilemmas in countertransference and empathy.

The UK Primary Health Care Reforms dating from 1990 have resulted in traumatic stress for General Practitioners (GPs) within the UK National Health Service (NHS). Previously, their first task had always been to provide care. Now the objectives are purely economic, focusing on cost-effectiveness and meeting Government targets. This article compares the Balint Model, set out by Michael and Edna Balint in the 1950s, to what is required in the current situation, and shows how group analysis can help GPs come to terms with their new professional identity and how they see their future.

This article focuses on the sexual abuse of females in families within a social context, as a social phenomenon which involves more families than we knew about or believed existed in the past, a phenomenon also involving ‘ordinary’ families we meet in everyday life and which is one aspect of the violence of the world in which we live. Problems arising from alterations in conscience of the victim and for the therapist in recognizing non-verbal communication are examined before the author identifies causes of feelings of self-guilt in the therapist. The therapeutic effectiveness of group resonance is demonstrated in a clinical case study, also showing how group therapy can help a victim of sexual abuse to work through past traumatic experiences.

This paper documents the development of a new approach to child and adolescent centered psychotherapeutic work in groups and with individuals. The work is with young survivors of political violence who all suffer from the problematic and troubling impact on them of violence, scapegoating, separation, loss and the many changes in their external and internal worlds during their developmental years.

Oppression can occur in the family, school workplace and cultural environment, and in the discourses of psychiatry and psychotherapy as well as under overtly repressive political regimes. Therapy with survivors of torture and organized violence is not a special case of therapy in a political context, nor of the need for politicized therapy. It is rather an example where these issues are writ large and where the place of psychotherapy in a general struggle for collective civilization, personal liberation and human rights can be given a particularly sharp focus. Group analysis provides a particularly valuable approach because it recognizes the dialectic between individual and group, and the resonance between different levels of context.

Professionals in many disciplines are interested in large group dynamics, and simultaneously, there is a need to formulate coherent trainings for large group leadership roles. Group analysis being my ‘home territory’ to explore these highly complex forces and challenges, this article is one woman’s group-analytic understanding of larger groups and issues of conducting larger groups in our interconnected and interdependent world.