The International Handbook of Group Psychotherapy

The stated purposes of this book are to document the origins and history of the group psychotherapy movement, to provide validation for its methodology, and to present all the papers given at the 1963 International Congress of Group Psychotherapy. These aims have little bearing on each other and can be evaluated separately. In the history of the group psychotherapy movement, Dr. J. L. Moreno is reported as the most important pioneer and present-day leader in the field. Such an emphasis on the significance of Dr. Moreno's role leaves the reader with the feeling that much controversy still exists among the schools of group therapy over claims for priority and influence. I suspect that this history, written by Zerka Moreno, will furnish as much heat as light to the controversy. The book does contain, however, some interesting portraits of the thinking and growth of other pioneers, such as Pratt, Lazell, Marsh, and Burrow, irrespective of their rankings in this history. Included is one especially interesting study which attempted to validate the usefulness of group therapy. John Mann found 41 papers in the literature that evaluated the effectiveness of group therapy and contained controlled group designs in their methodology. Each study used a variety of psychological tests measuring objective changes in attitude, personality and behavior. Significant changes were found in 45 per cent of the studies. No single theoretical approach was found to be superior. I am as impressed with the changes noted in this important article as I am with the fact that there are only 40 papers in the group therapy literature with a sufficiently sophisticated experimental design to be acceptable. The major portion of this book includes a wide variety of more than 120 papers, including such topics as the approach of group therapy to families, hospital settings, delinquents, alcoholics, sexual offenders and a formulation of various group therapy approaches, including interactional, analytic and psychodrama models. There is a wide range of sophistication to these papers although a number could have been usefully eliminated. The international flavor of the collection is enhanced by the number of untranslated articles, at the price of reduced communication. There are many excellent papers in this Handbook, and Norman Locke, Leon Tec, Milton Berger, Maxwell Jones, as well as the Morenos, have contributed but a few. This work is more a collection of articles touching on most aspects of group psychotherapy. It lacks the systematization of a basic book of group therapy, but contains many papers illustrating the present thinking and approach of this technique. This is not a textbook nor an introduction to group therapy. Rather, it is an important, if controversial, historical book that contains many significant papers on the theoretical foundations and applicability of group psychotherapy that professionals in the field will find most rewarding.