An analytic group psychotherapy session: Interpretations and hidden texts

Abstract

This article describes what happened with the participants and the group as a whole in an analytical group psychotherapy session. Our aim is to reveal how the particular session was run. We describe a period of resistance to change when the principal defences used were: somatization, acting-out, identification-with-the-aggressor, and, more specifically, language abuse leading to confusion. We discuss the value of interpretations that are focused on the group as a whole, where the group is considered to be an internal object. Although this article is not exclusively about an object- relations model, we attempt to analyze the influence of projective identification, which has an effect on the therapist's task of recognizing his 'container' and interpreting functions.