Psychotherapy in Group Care

Making Life Good Enough

Integrate psychotherapy with residential treatment to achieve positive results for patients in group care!

This book addresses the complex issues that arise in the effort to provide individual therapy in group care settings. It reviews classical case material, presents contemporary case studies, and examines practical and theoretical issues important to the effective delivery of treatment to individuals living in residential care.

Noted experts who have been associated with The Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, share knowledge garnered from years of real-world experience to help you stay at the leading edge of the field and provide effective individual treatment to your clients in long- and short-term residential care.

Psychotherapy in Group Care: Making Life Good Enough includes practical and theoretical chapters exploring important aspects of the group care paradigm. The book:

• presents a case study that describes vital aspects of the analytic process that emerged in work with an adolescent boy in a group home who felt as though he was a psychological orphan
• illustrates the role of play as a continuous and basic function in therapy and presents play-themed vignettes from analytic work with two young people in residential care
• revisits “Joey: A Mechanical Boy” and “Tommy the Space Child”-classic case studies from Bruno Bettelheim and Rudolph Ekstien-and explores the implications of contemporary relational theory for using the meaning and metaphor of behaviors and communications
• addresses issues of transference and counter-transference in the psychodynamic psychotherapy of a young girl in residential care-with a discussion of unrecognized rescue fantasies and projective identification, and of the need for residential childcare workers to recognize and work through the difficult feelings evoked in the process of working with seriously disturbed young people
• examines the structural basis for the integration of psychotherapy and residential treatment, considering the meaning of integration, variables that affect the manner and degree to which integration can be accomplished, and changes in the psychotherapists' roles that can maximize the potential of each variable
• explores three sets of theoretical issues facing clinicians as they play multiple roles in short-term residential treatment, discussing how conflicts in the roles of therapists and team leaders can be resolved, the implications of such a resolution in terms of confidentiality, and ways in which major approaches to psychotherapy can be adapted to new conditions
• considers the role of the primary clinician in relation to the residential team and explores the ways in which integration of psychotherapy and residential treatment can be implemented in the early phase of the treatment process