The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy Read Online Free PDF

her isolated from others. And gifts! How could she possibly give appropriate gifts without having others feel either disappointed or awed? There is no need to belabor the point; the loneliness of the very privileged is common knowledge. (Loneliness is, incidentally, not irrelevant to the group therapist; in chapter 7, I will discuss the loneliness inherent in the role of group leader.)
    Every group therapist has, I am sure, encountered group members who profess indifference to or detachment from the group. They proclaim, “I don’t care what they say or think or feel about me; they’re nothing to me; I have no respect for the other members,” or words to that effect. My experience has been that if I can keep such clients in the group long enough, their wishes for contact inevitably surface. They are concerned at a very deep level about the group. One member who maintained her indifferent posture for many months was once invited to ask the group her secret question, the one question she would like most of all to place before the group. To everyone’s astonishment, this seemingly aloof, detached woman posed this question: “How can you put up with me?”
    Many clients anticipate meetings with great eagerness or with anxiety; some feel too shaken afterward to drive home or to sleep that night; many have imaginary conversations with the group during the week. Moreover, this engagement with other members is often long-lived; I have known many clients who think and dream about the group members months, even years, after the group has ended.
    In short, people do not feel indifferent toward others in their group for long. And clients do not quit the therapy group because of boredom. Believe scorn, contempt, fear, discouragement, shame, panic, hatred! Believe any of these! But never believe indifference!
    In summary, then, I have reviewed some aspects of personality development, mature functioning, psychopathology, and psychiatric treatment from the point of view of interpersonal theory. Many of the issues that I have raised have a vital bearing on the therapeutic process in group therapy: the concept that mental illness emanates from disturbed interpersonal relationships, the role of consensual validation in the modification of interpersonal distortions, the definition of the therapeutic process as an adaptive modification of interpersonal relationships, and the enduring nature and potency of the human being’s social needs. Let us now turn to the corrective emotional experience, the second of the three concepts necessary to understand the therapeutic factor of interpersonal learning.

    THE CORRECTIVE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE
    In 1946, Franz Alexander, when describing the mechanism of psychoanalytic cure, introduced the concept of the “corrective emotional experience.” The basic principle of treatment, he stated, “is to expose the patient, under more favorable circumstances, to emotional situations that he could not handle in the past. The patient, in order to be helped, must undergo a corrective emotional experience suitable to repair the traumatic influence of previous experience.” 34 Alexander insisted that intellectual insight alone is insufficient: there must be an emotional component and systematic reality testing as well. Patients, while affectively interacting with their therapist in a distorted fashion because of transference, gradually must become aware of the fact that “these reactions are not appropriate to the analyst’s reactions, not only because he (the analyst) is objective, but also because he is what he is, a person in his own right. They are not suited to the situation between patient and therapist, and they are equally unsuited to the patient’s current interpersonal relationships in his daily life.” 35
    Although the idea of the corrective emotional experience was criticized over the years because it was misconstrued as contrived, inauthentic, or manipulative, contemporary psychotherapies view it