Group Counselling

Keith Tudor

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780803976207, 9780803976191
• eBook ISBN: 9781446239391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

`Group Counselling is an exceptionally practical and useful guide for anyone involved, or anticipating involvement, in groupwork? - Clive Lloyd, Therapeutic Communities

This book provides a comprehensive examination of theories and concepts relating to group counselling and shows how differing theoretical frameworks can be used as a basis for practice.

Organized around the counselling process, the book considers the practicalities of establishing and running a group, raising awareness of its life cycle, its cultural location and many other diverse issues. Special emphasis is placed on the importance of therapeutic attitudes and philosophies as a basis for practice, and humanistic and existential approaches to group counselling are given particular attention. The author encourages readers to be aware of their conceptual framework and how it influences their work.

1

---

Groups: History and Development

In this chapter I offer a brief history of groups, and distinguish between counselling groups across the three traditions or ‘forces’ of psychology – the psychodynamic, the behavioural and the humanistic/existential. I introduce the conceptual distinctions between working in, through and of the group and the implications of such distinctions for practice. Finally, I discuss concepts of group development and illustrate their usefulness to the counsellor working in, through and with groups.

A brief history of groups

Although histories vary, it seems that Worcester, an associate of the psychologist James, and Pratt, an internist, were the first practitioners of group therapy. From 1905, they organised consumptive patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital Outpatient Clinic, Boston into groups or classes. In establishing a preventive programme of ‘home sanatorium treatment’, Pratt was initially concerned to monitor patients’ progress and to educate them about their diet and environment. Later, he came to realise the importance of the mutual support created by patients having ‘a common bond in a common disease’ (Spotnitz, 1961, p. 29). He then became more interested in the psychological aspects of the groups and the interactions between group members. At around the same time as Worcester and Pratt were developing their outpatient groups, in 1909 Moreno was working with school children in Vienna, getting them to act out little plays, initially written for them, about various problems and issues of behaviour. Soon the children were presenting their own plays and Moreno was applying this impromptu role playing – psychodrama – to working with adults. In 1922 Moreno established the Theatre of Spontaneity in Vienna. This therapeutic method had – and has – three aspects: psychodrama, the acting out of roles; sociometry, the method of investigation about attitudes and relationships; and group psychotherapy, a term first coined by Moreno in 1932, which describes the philosophy of treatment (see Moreno, 1946/1964, 1958). Later, during the Second World War, Moreno and his colleagues, now in the United States, developed sociodrama, in which the audience became the community, acting out and dealing with issues, for instance, of racial conflict.

Also in Vienna at this time, Freud was establishing a Psychological Society study group, comprising amongst others Adler, Ferenczi and Rank, which met weekly on Wednesday evenings and which may be regarded as the first training group, if not group training.

From these different beginnings, historically the next major development was that the group began to be viewed from within the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis. In 1921 Freud published a short book on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud, 1921/1985a) in which he drew heavily on the work of the French psychologist Le Bon (1896/1920). Freud’s views on group psychology (summarised in the next section) led to a number of distinct traditions of group therapy within psychoanalysis.

Three figures were influential in the early application of psychoanalytic concepts to groups: Burrow (1927), who referred to his procedures as group analysis, that is, analysis in groups; Schilder (1936, 1939), who applied the technique of free association by encouraging his group patients to discuss whatever came into their minds; and Wender (1936), who observed that transference phenomena developed in groups as much as in individual analysis. In 1938, Wolf, an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had read the works of Burrow, Schilder and Wender, established his first psychotherapy group. Over the next ten years he developed his practice and by 1947 began to hold seminars in psychoanalytic group therapy at the New York Medical College. A year later, Wolf began a training workshop at the Postgraduate Center for Psychotherapy in New York and by 1954 the Center introduced a certification programme in group therapy. Wolf and his colleagues applied psychoanalytic concepts – resistance, transference, interpretation etc. – to the patients in the group, with very little modification of them, other than developing the notion of multiple transference which acknowledges that the patient’s transference manifests itself in and onto the multiple relationships in the group and not just with/onto the therapist. The advantage of such group therapy is that the patient shows more evidence of their neurosis and pathology and thus there is more data available to be analysed and interpreted.

Also in the 1940s, Lewin (1952) was developing field theory, whereby psychological relationships were viewed in terms of their surrounding field – in this case the group, which was understood as an entity in itself. Lewin established the training group (T-group), comprising volunteers (not clients) in order to study the qualities of the group – what he referred to as ‘group dynamics’. Following Lewin’s death in 1947, some of his associates founded the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, in which the T-group formed the basic education instrument (see Gottschalk, 1966).

Around the same time as Wolf was establishing his first psychotherapy groups in New York, in Britain Bion (who did not publish his work until 1961) and Foulkes (1948/1983, 1964) (who was also heavily influenced by Lewin) were developing a group dynamics approach to group psychotherapy which emphasised the importance of viewing the group itself as a coherent entity. This took place at a military rehabilitation hospital in Northfield in what became referred to as the Northfield experiments, and at the Tavistock Clinic in London. This focus on the dynamics of the group also led Bion, Foulkes and others to develop theoretical concepts relevant to the group-as-a-whole as distinct from applying concepts to the group borrowed from individual psychoanalysis. In 1952 Foulkes and other colleagues formed the Group Analytic Society; formal training developed with the founding in 1971 of the Institute of Group Analysis. This tradition has influenced the theory of systems (systems theory) in many groups such as families and organisations.

In the 1950s and 1960s, various psychologists and therapists, working within what has come to be known as the ‘third force’ of humanistic/existential psychology and psychotherapy (see pp. 14–20), began experimenting with and promoting more experiential approaches to psychotherapy, including working with groups in which the members’ – and therapists’ – experiencing of themselves and of each other became the focus of the group and interpersonal process and often dynamic encounter (see, for example, Whitaker and Malone, 1953; Gendlin and Beebe, 1968; Rogers, 1970/1973). Around the same time, gestalt therapists, influenced by Lewin’s field theory, were recognising the importance of both field and ground: ‘only the interplay of organism and environment . . . constitutes the psychological situation, not the organism and environment taken separately’ (Perls et al., 1951/1973, p. 19). Also, Berne, the founder of transactional analysis (TA), was developing his ideas on the principles, structure and dynamics of groups and of organisations (Berne, 1963, 1966). In 1970 Yalom first published his seminal work on The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, based on his research into the curative or therapeutic factors of groups (Yalom, 1970) (see Chapter 2). Although Yalom is an existential psychotherapist, his research and influence spreads across all schools of psychology.

Over the past thirty years, group analysis, group psychotherapy and group counselling have developed, been applied to more and a greater variety of settings, and have become more integrated into professional practice, with many individual counsellors/psychotherapists and other professionals such as social and health care workers, psychologists, management and organisational consultants leading or facilitating groups. Groupwork theory, in turn, has been influenced by other fields such as social work (which generally uses the term ‘groupwork’) (see Douglas, 1979, 1993; Glassman and Kates, 1990; Brown, 1992), family therapy (e.g. Satir, 1982) and by recent developments in social theory such as cybernetics and postmodernism (see Becvar et al., 1997). During the past twenty years, exponential development in electronic technology in the field of human communication has also had a significant impact on counselling – through the increasing provision and use of telephone counselling and communication through electronic e-mail and the world wide web of the internet. Whilst there appear obvious disadvantages about counselling via such media, the advantages of greater mutuality, that is relationships often with a team or group equalised through language (plain text) and the timing of the communication (stimulus and response, sending and receiving), and of relationships less mediated by social conventions and therefore perhaps more honest, should not be underestimated. In taking up the challenges of ‘computer therapeutics’, Lago (1996) argues for a theory of e-mail counselling and, from a person-centred perspective, considers its application to the early, pre-therapy phase of contact with the client. Rosenfield and Smillie (1998) discuss group counselling by telephone.

The three traditions

Broadly, there are three different traditions or ‘forces’ within psychotherapy: the psychoanalytic or psychodynamic, the behavioural and the humanistic (also referred to as the humanistic/existential). Theoreticians and practitioners within these different forces have different ideas about human nature, personality development, pathology or maladjustment, even differences between the terms used to describe the same phenomena, society, the process of change, groups, group dynamics and the role of the analyst/conductor/psychotherapist/counsellor. These are briefly reviewed as regards their contribution to our understanding of group counselling.

The psychoanalytic tradition

Psychoanalysis is, strictly, an individual therapy. The rules of treatment, requiring as near total privacy and confidentiality, and the format it takes, requiring regular attendance of anything from three to six times a week, make it almost exclusively an individual form of treatment. It is thus more accurate to discuss group therapy within this tradition as informed by psychoanalysis. None the less, Freud (1921/1985a) did write about group psychology and this informs psychoanalytic approaches to groups. His views of group psychology can be summarised thus:

• The individual in a group is less repressed and therefore displays ‘the manifestations of this unconscious [his instinctual impulses], in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition’ (p. 101).
• The individual ‘readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest’ (p. 101).
• The condition of the individual in a group is one of being hypnotic.
• By virtue of being in a group, the individual becomes a barbarian, a creature acting by instinct, with a lowered intellectual ability an ass.
• ‘A group is impulsive, changeable and irritable . . . led almost exclusively by the unconscious . . . incapable of perseverance . . . it has a sense of omnipotence . . . is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty . . . the feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated’ (pp. 104–5).
• A group requires excessive stimulus to produce an effect on it; it is nevertheless open to the influence of suggestion or suggestibility.

That Freud’s statements about group psychology appear somewhat undeveloped, is due to the fact that, for a number of reasons, he did not further elaborate his theory and analysis of groups. Other psychoanalytic influences also inform group theory and practice: from Adler, the value of social equality; from Jungian analytic psychology, the collective unconscious (see Boyd, 1991); whilst Kleinian theory influenced Bion (1961). Convergences between Jung and Foulkes are described in a special issue of Group Analysis (Fiumara, 1989). From these different historical influences, as well as developments in social and political theory, four d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Groups: History and Development
• 2 Preparing for the Group
• 3 Establishing the Group
• 4 The Working Group
• 5 Ending the Group
• 6 Groups in Residential Settings
• 7 Social Psyches: Groups, Organisation and Community
• 8 The Group Counsellor: Education, Training, Personal Development and Supervision
• Appendix 1: Best Practice Guidelines for Groupwork
• Appendix 2: Group Counselling: Q-sort Research
• Appendix 3: Group Counselling: A ‘simple’ group contract
• Appendix 4: Training Courses in Groupwork
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index