A ‘group catalytic therapy’ model based on an integration of group analysis and cognitive-analytic therapy: Initial development

We offer an initial presentation of an integrative group therapy model that we term ‘group catalytic’ therapy (GCT) which draws on group analysis and cognitive-analytic therapy (CAT). Although these models may appear to have different origins, conceptual underpinnings, and therapeutic focus, both have historical roots in the psychoanalytic tradition but have evolved significantly from it in different, but also in some curiously similar, ways. Both have been influenced by earlier ‘social psychologists’ (notably Elias and Vygotsky respectively) and are implicitly predicated on a concept of ‘self’ that is predominantly socio-relationally and culturally formed and located. Whilst group analysis has, by definition, focussed on psychological change occurring through often longer-term group processes, which may frequently be complex and challenging, CAT has focussed more on time-limited, explicitly pro-active, and collaborative individual work with a demonstrably-successful focus on engagement and retention. The latter is considerably assisted by co-created ‘reformulations’, both as diagrammatic ‘maps’ and written letters, understood in the language of Vygotsky as ‘psychological tools’. We suggest that these group analytic and CAT approaches are in many ways complementary and overlapping. Although any such new approach will need further detailed evaluation, including relative to other already-existing approaches, we suggest that this integrative ‘group catalytic’ approach could offer a further approach to treatment that is user-friendly, effective, more straightforward to learn for generic non-specialist trainees, and perhaps especially applicable in resource-limited settings such as public health services, and in attempting to treat more long-standing, ‘severe and complex’ presentations where engagement and motivation may be a major issue. Such an integrative model would also, importantly, explicitly acknowledge and address, for example through the process of collaborative mapping, the psychologically-internalised and contextual socio-cultural and socio-political factors, frequently in some way psychologically ‘traumatic’, fundamentally implicated in the origins and outcomes of mental health problems.