ABSTRACT
The main pioneer of group analysis was S. H. Foulkes, and he developed much of his thinking about groups in a therapeutic community setting, Northfield hospital, which treated so-called shell-shocked soldiers during the Second World War. Training programmes for offenders, delivered by tutors from an accompanying manual, based on ideas derived from cognitive behaviour therapy, became the order of the day. This chapter describes the key contribution made by W. R. Bion to a psychodynamic understanding of thinking, the relevance of his ideas to work with offender patients, and then how a therapeutic community can provide the matrix to enable thinking to develop. Bion’s emphasis on the thinking process in therapy seems to have been driven by a desire to arrive at the truth. The therapeutic setting provides such an opportunity for containment, but the principle of non-gratification provides an opportunity to experience frustration, and to learn to think under fire.
