1st Edition
Focused Group Analytic Psychotherapy An Integration of Clinical Experience and Research
This practical text lays out a new form of focused, time-limited group analytic psychotherapy, built on new and existing research, and integrating clinical experience from across the field.
Presented in three parts, Focused Group Analytic Psychotherapy clearly introduces the therapeutic approach, fully explores all the elements involved, from considering suitable patients to composing the group and the role of the therapist, and provides an in-depth examination of clinical quality assurance, research and the integration of supervision. Peppered with examples and vignettes from carefully designed research by the author and others, the chapters demonstrate how this approach can be used in group therapy with patients facing specific psychological problems, symptomatic distress and/or a problematic relationship to self or others.
This book will be an essential guide for psychotherapists who have primarily focused on individual psychotherapy and who want to learn more about groups, and to those, including group analysts, who have experience with long-term groups and want to learn more about time-limited groups.
Part I. 1. Introduction Part II. 2. Focused Group Analytic Psychotherapy 3. Who Can Benefit from Focused Group Analytic Psychotherapy? 4. Evaluation of Patients for Focused Group Analytic Psychotherapy (FGAP) 5. Establishing and Composing the Group – Introducing the Demonstration Group 6. The Group Process 7. The Therapist in Focused Group Analytical Psychotherapy Part III. 8. Clinical Quality Assurance – Evaluation of Therapy (Outcomes and Process) 9. Empirical Research on Group Psychotherapy 10. Supervision in Focused Group Analytic Psychotherapy
Biography
Steinar Lorentzen, PhD, is a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has trained as a psychoanalyst and group analyst and is a founding member of the Institute of Group Analysis and Group Psychotherapy in Norway, where he was a training analyst for many years. He has published book chapters, two books and numerous papers on different clinical psychiatric issues, with a particular focus on psychotherapy, psychodynamic groups and group analysis.
"Ever since Freud, mental health professionals have been wrestling with the dilemma of how to reconcile the scientific rigours of classification with the imaginative concepts underpinning the analytic process. Professor Lorentzen's research takes us a significant step forward on this journey. In clear, down-to-earth language and with clinical group analysis as his focus, he provides us with a welcome bridge over the divide". Dr Harold Behr, FRCPsych, Hon Member IGA London, former editor of the journal Group Analysis
"Dr. Lorentzen is an expert on group analysis. Focused Group Analytic Psychotherapy (FGAP) combines decades of clinical wisdom with rigorous research to inform beginning and advanced clinicians. I highly recommend FGAP as a significant contribution to the field". Gary Burlingame, PhD, Professor and Chair of Psychology and President-elect of the American Group Psychotherapy Association
"This book highlights one end of the wide spectrum of current interest and publishing in group-analysis, that runs from the firmly clinical aspects of the group approach to specific treatments for mental distress on to the opposite end concerned with the social unconscious, decolonization and climate change. Professor Steinar Lorentzen is a man of immense experience in both established and still emerging theories of psychodynamic psychotherapy. This extends beyond clinical work into the large, often untilled, fields of data accumulation and research, especially into the discipline that he has developed, that of Focused Group-Analytic Psychotherapy (FGAP)...He seeks in his disciplined and pragmatic way to bring clinicians back to that specific area of work, using groups and associated techniques for the relief of mental suffering. He also provides the reader with some personal experiences which add to his overall intention, to spread both FGAP practice and the research that backs it up. His latest book contains all the knowledge required for the FGAP to be understood, put into action and with research data to back it up. - Kevin Power, Group Analysis, 56(2)
