Group Analysis

Prisons serve to rescue us from the real need to think about the causes and effects of criminality including our shared responsibility for understanding destructiveness. The reluctance to think and share is mirrored in the structure of prison life and in the individual(ized) psyches of criminals. Group analysis with its emphasis on the matrix, ego training in action and power relations, offers the best opportunity to address these issues.

The debate on what can be effectively done to reduce crime, protect members of the public and lower recidivist rates continues in many quarters. As a result there are now several behaviour programmes delivered by the Home Office. In this article I intend to discuss psychodrama as a treatment approach that has been used for the past 20 years at H.M.P. Grendon Underwood and how its application can change the disruptive internal worlds of those who offend.

In this paper, the authors describe the work of a group set up for those patients who are leaving a high security forensic psychiatric hospital, all having been detained under the 1983 Mental Health Act for England and Wales. Background information on the hospital is presented, as well as an overall view of the patients and their problems. The origins of the group are documented, followed with examples of group dynamics peculiar to the practice of forensic psychotherapy and conscious and unconscious anxieties on the part of the therapists as well as the patients.

In this paper we argue that work with groups in forensic settings highlights key elements of the relational processes at the ‘outerface’ of the group, as well as within the group. Drawing on Bion's idea of containment we explore the triadic aspects that are fundamental to group and systems work and examine the specific quality of attention that this requires of the group therapist/analyst.

Setting up analytic psychotherapy groups on secure forensic wards is a complicated and arduous process. Once established, clinical work is even more difficult because emotional contact with forensic patients places extreme pressure on the countertransference. We review aspects of the psychoanalytic theory of countertransference related to increasingly serious levels of psychopathology in order to clarify why this should be so. Examples of clinical group analysis and work with forensic staff illustrate our experiences on the countertransference edge.

People with learning disabilities are at high risk of behavioural problems, including offending behaviours. Psychoanalytically based forensic psychotherapy is a recognized therapeutic option for offenders without disabilities. However, its application to people with learning disabilities who offend or are at risk of offending has largely been neglected. In this paper, after clarifying the concept of learning disability we look at its traditional neglect by psychoanalysis. Subsequently we describe important clinical characteristics associated with learning disabilities and offending with specific reference to group-analytic theory. Finally we offer a clinical illustration by briefly describing the assembling and conducting of a forensic psychotherapy group along group-analytic lines before reaching some important conclusions.

A period of transition in the life of a forensic outpatient group is described. Transference and countertransference issues were stirred up by the change of conductor, and related to the theme of perversion in the group. In order to preserve confidentiality, the identity of group members is disguised. Their contributions to the group have been combined and changed in order not to represent individuals but to convey the essence of the group process.

Although not all homeless people are personality disordered, many are offenders and all are de facto anti-social, either in their orientation to the world or in the eyes of the beholding world. We re-define and re-locate the problem from the social fact of the actual homelessness into the interpersonal and intrapsychic world of the ‘unhoused mind’, and explore the complex reciprocal relationship between the housed and the unhoused. The article concludes by discussing the impact on individual workers, staff teams and organizations who are tasked with attempting to help such people.