67th Annual Conference

Thursday, February 25

Session 302

Exploring The Group Therapist's Subjectivity (Demo)

Chair:

Richard M. Billow, Ph.D. ABPP, CGP, Director, Group Program, Derner Institute, Adelphi U., Garden City, New York

Panelists:

Bernard Frankel, Ph.D., ABPP, LCSW, LFAGPA, Clinical Professor, Derner Institute, Adelphi U, Garden City, New York
Karen Shore, Ph.D., CGP, Private Practice, Santa Monica, California

The therapist's subjectivity is the context within which the group is experienced and understood. The session will explore the availability of the demonstration group leader's basic feelings—loving-hating-curiosity—along with self-linkages to paranoid-depressive, manic, and melancholic states of mind, and how they contributed to group process and development.

Learning Objectives:

The attendee will be able to:
1. Employ of way of thinking, process, and formulating that is useful in understanding self/other/group.
2. Develop a conceptual framework to understand how the therapist comes to experience and utilize basic feelings and "primitive" as well as "sophisticated" mental states.
3. Identify as well as experience group enactments that are created at the interface of leader/group (inter) subjectivity.

Course References:
Billow, R. (2003) Relational group psychotherapy: From basic assumptions to passion. London: Jessica Kinglsey.

Racker, H. (1964) Transference and countertransference. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.