The Therapist’s Anxiety and Resistance to Group Therapy

Abstract

When therapists contemplate starting groups, consider placing an individual patient within an existing group, or respond to the group reconfigurations when members are added or replaced, it raises their anxieties and resistances. Under these circumstances, the therapist must contend with many intersubjective factors: dread, fear, and idealization of groups; contagion and amplification of psychological phenomena; absorption in the group mentality; magnification of the therapist’s centrality and importance; exposure and disturbance of existing relationships, and utilization of one’s own emerging and evolving thoughts, feelings, and fantasies, along with the group’s. Therapists learn about themselves and their groups by reviewing their countertransference, being alert to possible enactments, and listening to their patients, whose anxieties and resistances to group often reflect their own.