ABSTRACT
A patient who resists, declines, or attacks the therapist's opinion that group therapy is the treatment of choice may appear to the therapist to be impugning his or her judgment. In an excellent review of the literature on combined therapy, N. Wong discussed various aspects of the subject: classification, advantages, indications, contraindications, transference, transference splitting, counter transference, criticisms, and prognoses for patients with various diagnoses. Many group therapists fill their groups, at least in part, with patients from their individual psychotherapy practices. Intermittently broaching combined therapy can serve to monitor the patient's readiness to deal with the feelings of shame. Sources of counter transference reactions to the broaching and exploring of the possibility of having one's individual patient join group include: the issue of profitability, the transference of the patient in individual therapy, and the transference of the group-as-a-whole. Psychotropic medication introduced into a psychodynamic psychotherapy changes the nature of the therapy.
