Acting out is a common occurrence in group psychotherapy. After a brief review of relevant psychoanalytic and group psychotherapy literature, this paper presents various kinds of acting out by the individual group members and the handling of such acting out by the therapist, discusses acting out by the group as a whole, and gives a brief overview of acting out by the group therapist. Specific examples are given of acting out and ways of dealing with it.

Analytic group psychotherapy offers the potential for developing ego functions and enhancing identity formation. The nature of the interaction in group psychotherapy forces participants to deal with their perception of reality and revise their perceptions. After a brief review of the literature, focusing on the theoretical basis and ego development in analytic group psychotherapy, the paper discusses the following ego functions and gives an example of each: adaptation to reality, judgment, drive control, object relations (relationships with others), thought process and communication, defenses, affect differentiation, autonomy, mastery-competence, regulation of self-esteem, and frustration tolerance. The paper concludes with an example of assessing ego functions from a clinical vignette taken from one group psychotherapy session.

The authors view resistance generally as healthy and a sign of a more or less intact ego. A brief review of the psychoanalytic literature and the group therapy literature presents resistance as a mechanism that closes off aspects of the internal and external world seen as potentially dangerous. Patient resistances are identified as coming from cultural values, fear of strangers, fear of regression, and resentment toward the therapist. Clinical vignettes of group patients and group interaction are presented. Finally, resistance of therapists and indications of such resistance are also explored.

Group psychotherapy is presented as an effective way of changing the self-image and self-feelings; the image of the self and feelings about the self being brought into awareness by the group process. After a brief review of relevant literature, group-specific experiences that affect the self-image and self-feelings are described. These include: the “mirror phenomenon” and triadic relationships; resonance; direct confrontations and challenges from other members; comparing oneself with, and differentiating oneself from, other members; and experimentation with new, different ways of relating to other group members.

The sun was shining brightly and the snow was glistening as my husband and I drove along the beautiful Taconic Parkway on our way to Kent Cliffs, New York. Dr. Max Rosenbaum had invited us to lunch with him and his wife in their country house as a prelude to my interviewing him. We followed his instructions carefully, as we turned onto a country road and then onto an even narrower road, past 10 houses along the lake, until we found the mailbox marked Rosenbaum, then into the driveway.

This paper attempts to up-date our understanding of countertransference in the therapy group setting. After a brief review of some of the psychoanalytic and the group psychotherapy literature dealing with countertransference, the paper points out the vulnerability of the group therapist and presents examples of possible countertransferential situations, such as stereotyped roles, reactions to external aspects of patients, and therapists' insecurities. It concludes by suggesting ways in which group therapists can become more sensitive to their countertransferences.

After presenting some of the arguments against patients having contact with one another outside the regularly scheduled group psychotherapy sessions with the therapist, we present our counterarguments. Rather than forbidding extragroup socializing, thereby assuming the role of moralistic, punitive parental authorities to be deceived or challenged, we accept that such socializing is likely to happen and then establish beforehand the rule that information about extragroup contacts is to be shared with the entire group during regular therapy sessions with the therapist. In this way, the extragroup behaviors are dealt with just as any other material in group, i.e., searching for the underlying dynamics. Some positive aspects of extragroup socializing, as well as some negative aspects, are discussed, with examples taken from clinic groups and private practice groups.

This article discusses the clinical training of group therapists, the conditions under which students function as cotherapists, and the ways in which having a student trainee as cotherapist to an experienced group therapist can enhance or facilitate the therapeutic process for group members. Such enhancement can be brought about directly by: stimulating the emergence of new material; providing different perspectives and different reactions; providing different models; bringing out different transferences; affecting the working alliances; and requiring patients to deal with the loss of the cotherapist. It is brought about indirectly by: each therapist “picking up” on the “blind spots” or distortions of the other; each perceiving and discussing in supervisory conferences the other's countertransferences; and using weekly supervisory conferences to develop an increasingly cooperative relationship.

This report is a mid-latency follow-up of children previously studied during nursery school. The study shows that there is a need to question many of our assumptions about the development of children from birth to latency. The existence of an infantile neurosis is confirmed. The peak proportion of children judged as showing interference with their developmental progression was at age 6. By the age of 8 1/2, many of these children had begun to progress again in their development. Changes in the groupings of the children from year to year seemed to be more characteristic than stability of groupings. Between 4 and 6 years of age the change was toward more pathology and/or interference with development. Between 6 and 8 1/2 the change was in a positive direction, toward health. Findings suggest that early latency appears to be a period of expansion for girls more often than it does boys. Interference with developmental progression occurred earlier in girls. Practically all of the children in this study showed various degrees of pathology at different times during the 5 years of the project. However, the effect of pathology on development was not obviously apparent or easily anticipated. Symptoms alone could be misleading; the same clinical picture had different meanings for different children depending on the impact on development.

The necessity for assessing the mental health of young children has been increasingly recognized as our society turns to planning for preventive and clinical mental-health services for all the children in the community. The developing interest in questions of prevention and service on a large scale demands that experts in the mentalhealth field face up to the problem of devising appropriate techniques for identification at an early age of those children who need and can benefit from various forms of special services. In an attempt to explore this problem, the Child Development Center undertook a research project seven years ago with the aim of constructing a schedule for the assessment of development during the first six years-one that would be useable by different professional groups in their evaluation of children. As a first step toward achieving this goal, a comprehensive outline based on psychoanalytic developmental psychology was tried out with a sample population of children who were attending a community nursery-school. The process of constructing a comprehensive assessment outline for a nonclinical population; the difficulties encountered in making decisions about some of the children; and the finding that most