Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

58 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
and they come to accept modest expectations and not to act in a
depressive way. They do not wait but try – as the Stones say. By the
way, self-efficacy is an important issue in every treatment whether
individual or group.
Case report: The following case report shows that group therapy
added to individual psychoanalytic treatment. Two individual sessions
and one group session per week. It is an example of concurrent
therapy.
A woman with a recurrent depressive disorder, 57 years old,
working in her own company as architect. When we started treatment,
she had one son with an Asperger Syndrome and a husband with
pancreatic cancer. She grew up with four siblings, with a mother who
never wanted children at all, a father who drunk and acted violently,
sometimes with nothing to eat, sometimes with no heating in winter.
“I am a bad human” is her certainty. Her only authorization is to live
to be useful and capable and work hard. The main issues in the
individual treatment were superego and shame problems. She came
three times a week to individual therapy and after one year we decided
to replace the third session by participation the Tuesday evening
group. The increase of possibilities of transference helped her to get
access to her negative transference and to work on it in both
therapeutic settings. When her husband died in February this year,
after three years of suffering, she was sad and in grief but in no way
depressive. She had a good farewell with her husband although he
died. This was a very, very great success for her.
An example of her negative transference: the group discussed
the importance of being on time. She was very strict during this
discussion and actually had never been late. The following Tuesday
evening the traffic in Cologne was as terrible as it sometimes is in the
evening rush hour and she was late. She stood in front of the door and
didn’t ring the bell but turned to her car and drove home. She did not
dare to enter the group session late because she was frightened. We
met in the individual session after this incident and decided to figure
out what had happened in the next group session – feeling this
belonged to the group. In the next group session, group members were
astonished and shocked that she had not dared to enter the group. They
were able to work out that it was not the group or the group leader that
she was afraid of, but her inner objects – her parents, who both acted
violently in her childhood. In the individual sessions we spoke about
her extreme courtesy. After every session she very politely thanked
me for the session. Her deep gratitude seemed a bit exaggerated –