ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to recall a personal story, an experience which drew starkly to the author's attention some fundamental questions about the nature and place of the discipline which provides the common ground and link among the members of AASWG. Over recent years there has been a discernable trend towards groups that are increasingly task oriented, with decreasing emphasis being paid to process, reducing group work to a sterile exercise in which members receive packaged programmes that do not recognise them as unique individals often caught up in oppressive social conditions of poverty. Group work may have become unfashionable precisely because it acknowledges that groups develop lives of their own, over which the workers cannot ever have complete control.
