ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an approach to group therapy that is based on the idea that group psychotherapeutic process and change involves a constant movement into and through enactments that involve the group as a whole, the group analyst, and each group member. As the group therapist, the author's task is primarily to create and maintain the safe, productive, and transformational space within which the group can do its work. Group therapists almost universally talk about the focus on the "here-and-now" in group therapy: Patients are encouraged to talk about their experience in the here-and-now. Often, focus on past events or on future hopes is questioned as an avoidance or flight from what is going on in the here-and-now. The work of finding meaning rather than repetitive deadness is itself a reparative and restorative endeavor. In group psychotherapy, there is a constant dialectical movement between enactments of familiar chaos of patient's lives and the search to find the meaning in enactments.
