Psychoanalytic Theory Of Group Counselling

Many theories of group counselling have borrowed ideas and approaches from psychoanalysis. The primary aim of the analytic process is reorganize the client’s personality and character structure. This aim is attained by making unconscious conflicts conscious and analysing them. Wolf (1963, 1975) developed group applications of fundamental psychoanalytic approaches such as working with transference, free association, dreams, and the historical factors of existing behaviour. The group leader relates understanding to the family-like relations that emerge among the members and between the members and the therapist. Because of the family-like atmosphere, the group provides opportunities to evoke associations to both family-of-origin and present life

It is one of Freud’s most remarkable contribution and is the essential to interpret his perspective of the behaviour and the issues of personality. The unconscious is made up of those impulses, ideas, beliefs, rationale, and events that are kept out of our realization as a defence against anxiety. Freud believed that majority human conduct is influenced by external forces. The things we do in everyday life is usually formed by these unconscious purpose and needs.

The aim of psychoanalysis here is to make the unconscious conscious .The concept of the unconscious has deep significance for analytic group therapy. Group counsellor should have an understanding of how unconscious processes operate. This understanding provides group practitioners with conceptual framework that helps them make sense of interactions in a group, even if members do not deal with the unconscious

Group members who are frustrated are likely to feel angry. They may pick a target to vent their hostility.

The therapeutic process in psychoanalytic therapy focuses on re-creating, analysing, discussing, and interpreting past experiences and on working through defences and resistances that operate at the unconscious level. The working-through process represents the final phase of the analytic group and results in increased consciousness and integration of the self.

In psychoanalytic therapy, Rutan (2007) believe that “the therapist’s role is essentially to react rather than to initiate. The dynamic therapist waits for the group process to occur and then comment on it” (p. 170). As group interactions increases, the leader pursues participants’ unconscious motivations and investigates the historical roots of these motivations through analysis and interpretations.

The analytic model provides a conceptual framework for understanding an individual’s history and I am convinced that it is important to consider the past to fully understand present