65th Annual Conference

Saturday, February 23

Afternoon Workshops

2:15-5:30 P.M.

Workshop 90        

The Group Contract: Growth Opportunities as a Result of Contract Violations

Open to participants with less than four years of group psychotherapy experience

Chair:

Elizabeth B. Gaskill, M.S.W., CGP, Clinical Social Worker, Private Practice, Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts

The group contract provides leverage for the leader to help the group deal therapeutically with a member who violates the contract. The workshop will focus on the opportunities violations provide and their implications for strengthening the group boundaries, developing deeper individual and group meanings, and understanding resistance.
didactic-sharing of work experiences-experiential-demonstration
 

Learning Objectives:

The attendee will be able to:
1. Anticipate that the contract will be violated, but understand that it also secures in advance each member's agreement to take responsibility for the breaches.
2. Demonstrate the contractual violation as an opportunity to explore the psychodynamics, meanings and tensions around the violation.
3. Recognize that confronting a violation strengthens a group's sense of safety, boundaries and cohesion and enhances the therapeutic milieu.
4. Identify the resistance when the group as a whole permits a contractual violation to persist unscrutinized, thereby consciously or unconsciously avoiding uncomfortable feelings or thoughts.
5.Demonstrate that contractual violations can provide a group with insight into its resistances to therapeutic work, and that failure to attend to these violations and promote group discussion can have destructive consequences for a group.
 

Course References:

1. Gans, J.S., (19890). Hostility in group psychotherapy. International Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 39,499-516.
2. Gans, J.S. and Counselman, E.F., (1996), The Missed Session: A Neglected Aspect of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 33:43-50.
3. Gans, JS, (2006), Money and Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy. AGPA, 133-152.
4. Nitsun, M. (19960). The Anti-Group. London and New York: Routledge.
5. Ormont, L.R., (1968). Group Resistance and the Therapeutic Contract. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 18, 147-150.