THE WORKING SYSTEM OF PSYCHOTHERAPY GROUPS

Abstract

Group psychotherapy is known primarily as a technique and setting for treating psychiatric patients, and possibly as a method applied more widely for furthering social adjustment or providing information where other means of education would not be effective. It is also, and indeed in order to succeed must be, an experiment in social organization. It either attempts to establish a new working social unit from a collection of individuals, or to give purpose in action to an organized system which has lacked it. In the incipient structuring and later interaction of psychotherapy groups, the social scientist can study_ processes which can neither be experimentally produced in the laboratory, nor so directly observed in other real-life social units.