ABSTRACT
As far as therapy groups are concerned, and if circumstances allow, it may well be better to place one or two older patients in groups containing a spread of ages, reflecting the spread of the generations. This chapter describes some important features of the basic structure of any group intended to provide something helpful or constructive for its members. Such groups would include staff support groups, occupational therapy groups, groups for the purposes of remembering, recalling, and even recording personal histories, activity groups, as well as the formal psychoanalytic psychotherapy groups, on which the second half of the chapter focuses. In a hospital setting, sometimes medical staff will want to extract a group member on a particular day for what seems to them like a good reason. It is important for the therapist to be clear about the value of group therapy as a treatment modality with advantages of its own over and above its obvious cost-effectiveness.
