ABSTRACT
In the earliest days of psychoanalysis, the discipline created a key difference from other professional consultations. Beyond any instruction or advice, it introduced the epochal idea of transference, explaining to the patient how the therapy relationship was a restatement of the patient's relationship with his parents. The therapeutic setting thus became a microcosm, bespeaking a lifetime beyond the world in which the therapist and patient were immediately engaged. The Life Focus Community group has a number of characteristics that foster its implications of microcosm. There are three historical developments that inform the process, namely: group therapy, the encounter group movement, and professional logistics. Therapy became time-bound when it established the ideal of "terminated" therapy, and so fulfilled the medically familiar premise of a finite curative period. Psychotherapy's priority for individual life scenarios was a decisive orientation and certainly merited great support.
