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Working With Emotions in Psychotherapy. By Leslie S. Greenberg and Sandra C. Paivio. New York: The Guilford Press, 1997, 303 pp., $35.00.
Knowing Feeling: Affect, Script, and Psychotherapy. Edited by Donald L. Nathanson. New York: Norton, 1996, 425 pp., $45.00.
Group psychotherapy offers the opportunity to learn about emotional life in relationship to oneself and others. The group milieu is a breeding ground for emotional experiences. The most defended of us will not be able to resist the powerful forces in the group, and will experience feelings of all sorts sooner or later. The task of the therapy group is to explore fully the experienced emotions, to learn to express them, and to understand their meanings (Cohen, 1997). Change occurs as a result of the processing of emotional experiences.
In order for the group therapist to be effective, she or he must be able to be conversant with the emotions. Intellectual understanding without emotional insight is empty; mere support and mirroring are ultimately unsatisfying and can be stultifying. Two authors who have contributed to our understanding of the emotions in psychotherapy have written and edited two new books that are worthy of the group therapist's attention.
Leslie Greenberg has devoted his professional life to the study of emotions in psychotherapy. His book, published with Jeremy Safran, Emotion in Psychotherapy (Greenberg & Safran, 1987), was one of the first to examine in detail the relationship among emotions, cognition, and therapeutic change. The authors, developing the thesis that emotions play an adaptive role in human life, relied heavily on evolutionary biology for their theories on emotions. Chapter 6 of that book, "Affective Change Processes," is innovative and thorough. Beginning with assessment of affect, Greenberg and Safran moved through the change process itself-including acknowledging, creating meaning, and arousal-to therapeutic interventions, including attending, refocusing, present-centeredness, analyzing expression, intensifying, establishing intents, and facilitating the change process. An interesting personal...