Free The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

respond very differently to the same stimulus. An incident may occur in the group that each of seven or eight members perceives, observes, and interprets differently. One common stimulus and eight different responses—how can that be? There seems to be only one plausible explanation: there are eight different inner worlds. Splendid! After all, the aim of therapy is to help clients understand and alter their inner worlds. Thus, analysis of these differing responses is a royal road—a via regia—into the inner world of the group member.
    For example, consider the first illustration offered in this chapter, the group containing Valerie, a flamboyant, controlling member. In accord with their inner world, each of the group members responded very differently to her, ranging from obsequious acquiescence to lust and gratitude to impotent fury or effective confrontation.
    Or, again, consider certain structural aspects of the group meeting: members have markedly different responses to sharing the group’s or the therapist’s attention, to disclosing themselves, to asking for help or helping others. Nowhere are such differences more apparent than in the transference—the members’ responses to the leader: the same therapist will be experienced by different members as warm, cold, rejecting, accepting, competent, or bumbling. This range of perspectives can be humbling and even overwhelming for therapists, particularly neophytes.

    THE SOCIAL MICROCOSM—IS IT REAL?
    I have often heard group members challenge the veracity of the social microcosm. Members may claim that their behavior in this particular group is atypical, not at all representative of their normal behavior. Or that this is a group of troubled individuals who have difficulty perceiving them accurately. Or even that group therapy is not real; it is an artificial, contrived experience that distorts rather than reflects one’s real behavior. To the neophyte therapist, these arguments may seem formidable, even persuasive, but they are in fact truth-distorting. In one sense, the group is artificial: members do not choose their friends from the group; they are not central to one another; they do not live, work, or eat together; although they relate in a personal manner, their entire relationship consists of meetings in a professional’s office once or twice a week; and the relationships are transient—the end of the relationship is built into the social contract at the very beginning.
    When faced with these arguments, I often think of Earl and Marguerite, members in a group I led long ago. Earl had been in the group for four months when Marguerite was introduced. They both blushed to see the other, because, by chance, only a month earlier, they had gone on a Sierra Club camping trip together for a night and been “intimate.” Neither wanted to be in the group with the other. To Earl, Marguerite was a foolish, empty girl, “a mindless piece of ass,” as he was to put it later in the group. To Marguerite, Earl was a dull nonentity, whose penis she had made use of as a means of retaliation against her husband.
    They worked together in the group once a week for about a year. During that time, they came to know each other intimately in a fuller sense of the word: they shared their deepest feelings; they weathered fierce, vicious battles; they helped each other through suicidal depressions; and, on more than one occasion, they wept for each other. Which was the real world and which the artificial?
    One group member stated, “For the longest time I believed the group was a natural place for unnatural experiences. It was only later that I realized the opposite—it is an unnatural place for natural experiences.” 48 One of the things that makes the therapy group real is that it eliminates social, sexual, and status games; members go through vital life experiences together, they shed reality-distorting facades and strive to be honest with one another. How many times have I