Working through a group's fantasy of the deceased leader's wish for the group's continuation

This paper reflects the working through of a group's fantasy that the deceased group leader wished the group to continue. As in any defense, the fantasy protected members from the pain of the finality of the leader's death. This article reveals the subjective experience concerning the effect of the leader's death on the group and members' intrapsychic struggle to separate and individuate from the deceased leader, while attending to and striving toward the group's continuation. The group's painful and growing individuation enabled the group to follow its own tasks without the spector of the deceased leader.     

Politics in psychotherapy: Therapists' responses to political material

This paper reviews the psychotherapeutic literature that addresses the ways in which political material is engaged with by psychotherapists. The paper explores this in both the traditional and contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches. The paper concludes with a recognition of some of the challenges psychotherapy faces in developing politically sensitive approaches which draw upon the lessons learned across therapeutic theory.     

Psychodrama: group psychotherapy through role playing.

The theory and the therapeutic procedure of classical psychodrama are described along with brief illustrations. Classical psychodrama and sociodrama stemmed from role theory, enactments, "tele," the reciprocity of choices, and the theory of spontaneity-robopathy and creativity. The discussion focuses on key concepts such as the therapeutic team, the structure of the session, transference and reality, countertransference, the here-and-now and the encounter, the group-as-a-whole, resistance and difficult clients, and affect and cognition. Also described are the neoclassical approaches of psychodrama, action methods, and clinical role playing, and the significance of the concept of behavioral simulation in group psychotherapy.     

Tracking a group's focus on normative-organizational or personal exploration issues

Group - This last paper in the series on group development and emergent leaders presents a process analysis variable designed to track the group's focus on either normative and organizational...     

Working through: 1914-1984

This paper reviews the various meanings given to "working through" by Freud and others. The relation of "working through" to "analysis" is discussed and illustrated.     

Shadowed reality or the 'Prometheus-complex': analytical psychotherapy after political imprisonment and persecution

Traumatic experiences of violence like those that were brought about by the communist regime of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) are still present as if they happened yesterday, causing severe disadvantages in everyday life even after all those years. Consequently, in cases of extreme traumatization induced by political imprisonment, persecution and applied psychological methods of disintegration, regressive processes take place which corrode the ego. The breakdown of cathexis, i.e., the failure of empathic connection at the time of the trauma, is the strongest characteristic of severe traumatization. As a result of this destruction for the traumatized there is an inability to keep upright an inner empathic, emotional connection. As we try to grasp, from a Jungian point of view, the psychodynamics of severe traumatization, we can speak of a powerful pathogenous complex, which I call the 'Prometheus-complex'. Gustav Bovensiepen speaks of this complex as a sub-network, a limited fragment of the matrix of all internalized experiences, consisting of internal working models, feelings and patterns of anticipation which interact mutually. The human being, captured in such isolation and paralysis of the mind, can find himself 'in the therapist' on a mental level.     

Healing through meeting: A dialogical approach to psychotherapy

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Models of group psychotherapy: sifting through confusion.

This editorial introduces a series of articles by leading proponents of the ten major models of group psychotherapy to appear in the International Journal of Group Psychotherapy. These theoretical contributions will be published throughout 1992 as a dedication to the American Group Psychotherapy Association's (AGPA) 50th anniversary. In the present article, the author reports results from a recent survey of senior clinicians within AGPA who expressed their opinions about the central issues that practitioners should understand during the working phase of group treatments. Statistical comparisons among action-oriented, interpersonal, and psychodynamic respondents to the questionnaire revealed striking differences in how therapeutic interventions were conceptualized. These findings are outlined as a preface to the first three articles in the series.     

Joining a group's task: the discovery of hope and respect

When engaged with others in tension-filled dialogue, the temptation is for us to treat the other disrespectfully by unconsciously choosing an exclusive subgroup in our minds to belong to, and assigning the other to a devalued group. Unconsciously asserted exclusive membership allows us to deny the ways in which, by disconnecting the other, we are also alienating parts of ourselves. Using three stories, the author explores the notion of unconscious group membership and raises the possibility of discovering a shared membership in the midst of conflict. Internalized shared group membership can constitute a mediating "third" to a dyad in apparent opposition. The shared internal context both contains and defines the pair within a task and set of values that can be used to transcend apparent conflict.     

"Working through" and the novel

Prone to jargon, psychoanalytic literary criticism must be circumspect lest it appear narrow, sectarian, judgmental or exploit a particular psychoanalytic theory. Salient imagery, symbolism, metaphor, and psychologically intuitive characterization in the novel may be viewed as evocative of central, conflictual, predominantly unconscious source of experience or fantasy (Arlow, 1979) synchronizing with autobiographical and biographical data in achieving more dynamic, interpretive syntheses. VW's emotional state is an emergent of her total personality interacting with and evolving in her highly complex family milieu. Though she claimed writing the novel modulated the preoccupation with her parents, essentially VW did not resolve her obsession with the cumulative and untimely deaths of her parents and siblings but engaged in her writing in a perpetual mourning of these and other psychological losses for most of her life. Her life and work reflect the processes of "repetition" and "elaboration" also intrinsic to the psychoanalytic process but she did not achieve the memory "reconstructions" and "changes in self-esteem" alluded to by Kris (1956a, 1956b) and Greenson (1965) as intrinsic to the psychoanalytic experience of insight and "working through."     

Anaesthesia or psychotherapy: Eradicating thoughts or working them through

The author presents two sessions from the analysis of a depressive narcissistic doctor, which are characterised by a mixture of co-operation and pseudo-co-operation. The dialogue is in parts intellectualised, complicated, lifeless and schizoid. Points at which the patient shows surprising insights are then partly denigrated by him, on the basis that change is not to be expected. Semi-lifeless contact assists the defensive claustrophobia that he experiences in meaningful contact. It becomes very clear that he is then afraid of entering into an openly aggressive conflict that entails the existential threat of object loss. However, this has so far been avoided. The secret pleasure in an anal-narcissistic, sadomasochistic addiction to doubt persists in the partial denigration. The patient's artificially maintained self-doubt and doubt of the object reinforce a genuine confusion that consists in never knowing exactly what lies behind the helpful and needed object.