The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy Read Free Page A

group, presented the single greatest challenge for this revision. Because the encounter group qua encounter group has faded from contemporary culture, we considered omitting the chapter entirely. However, several factors argue against an early burial: the important role played by the encounter movement groups in developing research technology and the use of encounter groups (also known as process groups, T-groups (for “training”), or experiential training groups) in group psychotherapy education. Our compromise was to shorten the chapter considerably and to make the entire fourth edition chapter available at www.yalom.com for readers who are interested in the history and evolution of the encounter movement.
    Chapter 17, on the training of group therapists, includes new approaches to the supervision process and on the use of process groups in the educational curriculum.
    During the four years of preparing this revision I was also engaged in writing a novel, The Schopenhauer Cure, which may serve as a companion volume to this text: It is set in a therapy group and illustrates many of the principles of group process and therapist technique offered in this text. Hence, at several points in this fifth edition, I refer the reader to particular pages in The Schopenhauer Cure that offer fictionalized portrayals of therapist techniques.
    Excessively overweight volumes tend to gravitate to the “reference book” shelves. To avoid that fate we have resisted lengthening this text. The addition of much new material has mandated the painful task of cutting older sections and citations. (I left my writing desk daily with fingers stained by the blood of many condemned passages.) To increase readability, we consigned almost all details and critiques of research method to footnotes or to notes at the end of the book. The review of the last ten years of group therapy literature has been exhaustive.
     
    Most chapters contain 50–100 new references. In several locations throughout the book, we have placed a dagger (†) to indicate that corroborative observations or data exist for suggested current readings for students interested in that particular area. This list of references and suggested readings has been placed on my website, www.yalom.com .

Acknowledgments
    (Irvin Yalom)
    I am grateful to Stanford University for providing the academic freedom, library facilities, and administrative staff necessary to accomplish this work. To a masterful mentor, Jerome Frank (who died just before the publication of this edition), my thanks for having introduced me to group therapy and for having offered a model of integrity, curiosity, and dedication. Several have assisted in this revision: Stephanie Brown, Ph.D. (on twelve-step groups), Morton Lieberman, Ph.D. (on Internet groups), Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D. (on group-as-a-whole interventions), David Spiegel (on medical groups), and my son Ben Yalom, who edited several chapters.
     
    (Molyn Leszcz)
    I am grateful to the University of Toronto Department of Psychiatry for its support in this project. Toronto colleagues who have made comments on drafts of this edition and facilitated its completion include Joel Sadavoy, M.D., Don Wasylenki, M.D., Danny Silver, M.D., Paula Ravitz, M.D., Zindel Segal, Ph.D., Paul Westlind, M.D., Ellen Margolese, M.D., Jan Malat, M.D., and Jon Hunter, M.D. Liz Konigshaus handled the painstaking task of word-processing, with enormous efficiency and unyielding good nature. Benjamin, Talia, and Noah Leszcz, my children, and Bonny Leszcz, my wife, contributed insight and encouragement throughout.

Chapter 2
    INTERPERSONAL LEARNING
    I nterpersonal learning, as I define it, is a broad and complex therapeutic factor. It is the group therapy analogue of important therapeutic factors in individual therapy such as insight, working through the transference, and the corrective emotional experience. But it also represents processes unique to the group setting that unfold only as a