Operative Groups: The Latin-American Approach to Group Analysis

Group therapy and other dynamic approaches to the co-ordination of groups may focus either on the individual psychodynamics or on the group-as-a-whole. In Britain, group analysis developed as a group-centred approach of both therapeutic and non-therapeutic groups, from the foundational work of S.H. Foulkes. But there has been another, independent, Latin-American school of group analysis, which originated in Argentina as a result of the work and teachings of the Swiss born Argentine psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon-RiviŠre. This volume is a thorough introduction to operative groups. It starts by guiding the reader through the ideas of Pichon-RiviŠre, who conceived operative groups as a whole way of thinking and acting in groups, and then shows how the two schools of group analysis - the British and the Latin-American - coincide and inter-relate, shedding light on the theory behind both and including useful case material of various kinds of groups to illustrate such theory.