ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the advantages and disadvantages of the modality and provides unsupported opinions as to the less publicized reasons that might motivate some group therapists to deprecate or avoid the rigors of a co-therapy experience. The advantages listed include: ongoing consultation on diagnosis, psychodynamics, and group level appropriateness; and likelihood of more consistent and microscopic understanding by the therapist of ongoing material from sessions. They also include opportunity for increased clarification and scope of transference phenomena as related to parental imagos, less interruption of ongoing group process by therapist absence, as well as greater opportunity to explore, on the spot, the dynamics of feelings about therapist absence. The disadvantages of the co-therapy method listed include: financial loss to the therapist; decreased freedom for the therapist to make his own idiosyncratic arrangements, loss of possible counter-transference gratifications; and reduction of potential for narcissistic gratification for the therapist.
