Adlerian Group Counseling and Therapy

Step-by-Step

James Robert Bitter, Manford A. Sonstegard, Peggy Pelonis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135935009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

Adlerian Group Counseling and Therapy: Step-by-Step represents a distillation of some of the most significant ideas pertaining to the group work of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs. Drs. Manford Sonstegard and James Bitter illustrate the development of a group from its formation to its final stage, giving readers a clear picture of what is important to accomplish at each stage of the group. This book also addresses many practical dimensions of the Adlerian group process, including: forming a group relationship; creating a democratic and accepting climate; conducting psychological assessments; increasing the awareness and insight of group members; translating group insight into action; methods of re-education through encouragement; and building on personal strengths discovered within the group experience.

Part I
The Process and Practice of Adlerian Group Counseling and Therapy

CHAPTER 1
A Rationale for Adlerian Group Work¹

In this chapter, we:

• Discuss the importance of the group in the formation of human life;
• Delineate the interrelationship of democracy and group work;
• Consider group counseling and therapy as:
  
  • Experiential learning.
  • A foundation for the development of voice.
  • A venue for social support.
  • A context for both personal and interactive meaning.
  • A process for values clarification and formation.
  • A structure for the implementation of democratic process.

Every child is born into a group. In most cases, this group is the family, but even in alternative situations, a child needs a group to survive. The child’s early helplessness parallels the individual inferiorities of early humans. Adler (1957) was the first to suggest that Darwin’s (1976) imperatives for survival of the species had a concomitant psychological stance in the human condition. In comparison to other animals, early humans had poor eyesight, dull claws, insensitive hearing, and slowness of movement. Like other species with individual weaknesses, human survived by forming into a herd, dividing the labor, and eventually building a community. The psychological stances that supported this group formation were a feeling of belonging and interdependence; nurturance, friendship, and support; mutual respect; and cooperation and loyalty: the same things that a child requires to live and grow. Just as the family must adjust to accommodate each new child, each child must develop her or his own unique place and approach to integration within the group. The methods chosen by each person are in keeping with the individual’s self-concept and interpretation of life. The family is the first group in which most people must find a place. As the child extends her- or himself into new realms (the school, and ultimately the community), the struggle to belong broadens, with one’s peer group often becoming the strongest force.

One of the great paradoxes within the human condition is that cooperation within a group does not necessarily imply cooperation between groups. That is, cooperation and competition can exist simultaneously. This can be seen in a positive sense when two sporting teams take the field, each team cooperating as a unit or group while competing with the other. It can also exist in a negative sense: two inner city gangs at war, for example, or when a group experiencing discrimination bonds together, but simultaneously discriminates against another, perhaps less fortunate, group. What Dreikurs (1971) used to call the “war between the sexes” and the “war between the generations” reflect this tendency of humans in like condition to come together and to cooperate within the group while competing with those on the outside. Indeed, it is often a group-defined “outside force or threat” that motivates the formation and maintenance processes of a group.

In previous centuries, two conditions contributed to a greater ease in children discovering and adapting to their place. Both of these conditions began to erode with the development of an industrialized, and increasingly technological, urban society. The effects, however, were still evident even as late as the middle of the 20th century.²

The first condition extended from our long history of human autocratic and totalitarian states; whether these governments were aristocracies or male-dominated ideological systems, the regulatory procedures placed a high priority on control. Rigid hierarchies, defined by axioms of superiority and inferiority or ideological necessity, used authoritarian processes to institutionalize and maintain that control. Children born into these systems had very little choice about how they would develop, to which stratum they would belong, and with which group they would identify. If any person, child or adult, attempted to “get beyond themselves,” all the mechanisms of the strata above—and even the government itself—could be exercised to keep a person in his or her place.

The second condition pertained to those societies that were essentially agrarian. In these societies, large families were both necessary and the norm. The outside forces against which families organized were the weather, seasonal requirements, pests, and disease and injuries affecting people, animals, or crops. Here again, children were taught essential tasks early. They knew how they fit into the system, and they had a place well before they reached what we now call “adolescence.”³

Political freedom and social democracy always augment options and increase the fluidity of individual movement between socioeconomic strata. Education and technology are the means by which both individual and group options are most often actualized. An increase in personal freedom and social equality, however, does not imply that people are prepared to handle these benefits or their effects; this is especially true for children. Where order and place are no longer predetermined, each individual must struggle with multiple possibilities to create a place for oneself.

Still, each child starts in a given group, and each child both influences and is influenced by the members of that group—before moving on to other groups in which the child will again exchange influences. People may change the groups with which they associate many times over a lifetime. In each case, they will leave their mark, and they will also change. The impact of the group on each child is easily observed whenever the child participates in that group. The use of the group to influence the child constitutes not only an effective means of teaching, but also an effective way to offer corrective influences (Dreikurs, 1957; Sonstegard, 1968).

At the end of the 20th century, democracies are exploding across the political landscape. Group techniques are more imperative now than ever before; in each of these political democracies, the authority of the privileged individual is being replaced with the authority of the group. The group is ultimately the reality in which all of us will operate.

Every time democracies begin to emerge, group methods in one form or another come into vogue. Socrates used a form of group counseling with youth that consisted basically of reorientation by means of well-framed questions. Aristotle, too, was aware of the cathartic effect of theater, both for the group of participants and for the audience (Copleston, 1959).

In the twentieth century, group counseling and therapy has codeveloped with the psychological professions. It had its beginning in Europe at the turn of the century, and it reached its peak in the two and a half decades following World War II. During this same period, every time a country retreated from democracy (into totalitarianism), group procedures were totally abandoned: This happened in much of Europe during the World Wars and in all of the Eastern Europe with the formation of the Communist block. It is not surprising, therefore, that group process and practice has developed most rapidly in the United States. For not only does group process require a democratic atmosphere, it creates one.

Adler appears to have been the first psychiatrist to use group methods deliberately and systematically in his child guidance clinics in Vienna⁴ (Hoffman, 1994). They were not clinics as we think of them in an era of managed care. Adler met with groups of teachers and the parents of the children these teachers served. His most common procedure involved a careful consideration of data provided by educators before interviewing children and parents in the presence of other commu...