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Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations: An Integration of Twelve-Step and Psychodynamic Theory, 2nd edn
PHILIP J. FLORES
New York, The Haworth Press, 1997 657 pp., US $29.95, ISBN 0 7890 6001 9
The group psychotherapies enjoy a robust popularity in addiction treatment. While American textbooks of the 1940s and 1950s fail to mention group therapies in their discussions of treating alcoholism and other addictions, by the mid-1960s a US national survey of alcoholism programs reported that "group therapy is widely used in work with alcoholics-far more so, it appears, than with the general run of psychiatric patients. Furthermore, it seems to be widely used as a treatment of choice rather than as a substitute for individual therapy" (Glasscote et al. 1967, p. 15). By 1977, a major reference on alcoholism treatment stated, "In recent years there appears to have emerged a consensus among the scientific and professional community to the effect that among the various psychotherapies a group approach seems to offer the brightest prospect" (Doroff, 1977, p. 236).
This rapid spread of group therapy as a central component of addiction treatment was not a result of scientific research but rather an outgrowth of trial and error, combined with the development of a series of treatment models incorporating peer support, the use of recovering alcoholics/addicts...