Creating Contact, Choosing Relationship: The Dynamics of Unstructured Group Therapy (Jossey Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series)

Much of the recent literature surrounding group therapy has focused on structured interactions. Yet because individuals bring their unique histories and qualities to a group, structured interactions can sometimes constrain the potential intimacy and learning that can occur in less structured settings. This book explores how the dynamics of unstructured groups can help achieve therapeutic objectives, foster human growth, and create meaningful relationships.
In Creating Contact, Choosing Relationship, Richard Page and Daniel Berkow offer a framework for enhancing the benefit participants can gain from engaging in interactions that are not structured according to predetermined patterns. They outline ideas for working toward two essential goals of the therapeutic process: working on personal problems and learning how to develop mutually satisfying relationships. And they reveal how professionals can improve their recognition of themes such as love, power, and self-actualization in others.
They offer insights into incorporating both therapists' and group members' inherent capacity for creativity and self-direction into group interaction - and they reveal how this can enhance the change process. Page and Berkow also show how to use feedback to enhance authenticity, and offer insights for overcoming the problems created by denial in group settings.
The authors provide an innovative, ethically oriented therapeutic approach that can be applied in diverse settings by a variety of mental health practitioners - including psychologists, counselors, social workers, and therapists in private practice. Applying existential and psychodynamic concepts, the authors show how development can occur through both interpersonal interactions and perceptual processes within individuals, and they show how unstructured groups can enhance both of these facets of human development.
Page and Berkow demonstrate how their approach can help practitioners better interpret interactions that occur within the context of relationships as well as within the group as a whole. They provide guidelines for contending with potential conflicts of values between practitioners and institutions and offer insights into the political, social, and cultural aspects of implementing this theory in practice.

RICHARD C. PAGE is a professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Development Services at the University of Georgia in Athens. DANIEL N. BERKOW is a therapist at the University Counseling Services at Kansas State University at Manhattan, Kansas.