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Understanding Group Psychotherapy. By Irvin Yalom. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1991. (Only the outpatient tapes from the three-volume, five-videotape set are reviewed.) The outpatient tapes are $225.00 each. The entire set is $495.00.
Dr. Irvin Yalom's tapes, entitled "Understanding Group Therapy," are a fine teaching tool for the clinician or teacher attempting to address basic principles of long-term, outpatient group therapy. Dr. Yalom instructs us through two vehicles: (a) four live fragments of a demonstration group's therapy sessions that he leads with a coleader; and (b) commentary he provides about the live action, underlining several of the well-known principles of interpersonal group therapy that he has addressed in greater detail in his many books and articles (Yalom, 1983, 1985). Yalom frames the action well at the beginning of the tape, explaining from the outset that the theory and technique he will be portraying and describing is specific to long-term, outpatient group therapy. He clarifies the function of actors in playing roles representative of actual experiences he has extracted from many years of clinical practice. Also, he says a few words about the typical screening process he employs to form an outpatient group, including several contraindications to including certain potential group members.
The action itself does in fact portray moments familiar to outpatient group therapists. Dr. Yalom's first vignette highlights his intervention toward the end of a first session to teach the members the importance of here-and-now interpersonal feedback. The second vignette demonstrates his and his coleader's fielding an attack on the leadership, which the leaders convert into a reiteration of the importance of confidentiality and some elaboration of group norms. The third portion demonstrates a somewhat extended confrontation of a member's lateness and other related characterological defenses, again emphasizing the medium of here-and-now interactions. Finally, the last vignette demonstrates an example of sensitive self-disclosure by a member, which Yalom develops in vivo by encouraging further interactive responses by group members to his revelation. (Yalom contrasts this kind of self-disclosure with in-depth intrapsychic disclosure in his subsequent commentary.) Yalom's comments emphasize his particular theoretical bent: the importance of here-and-now interactions in effecting therapeutic change, the importance of establishing cohesiveness and clarifying group norms in the early stages of group development, and the importance of the...