ABSTRACT
Group psychotherapists will recognize the feeling of a psychotherapy group beginning to form. The group begin to work together as a group, and the psychotherapist, perhaps for the first time, experiences a countertransference feeling to the group-as-a-whole, instead of to the individual members of the group. The principal element in this process is the continuous back-and-forth movement in the group between couple dynamics and family dynamics, between two-person and three-person relating. In normal two-object couple relating, the group members become interested in and sensitized to one another as individuals. Group members might discover or re-acquaint themselves with an estranged or imagined sibling, lover, or parent in the group analyst or in another group member. Individual members can experience and helpfully use, in the group, long sequences of couple relationships that both re-visit the past and attempt new ways of relating.
