The Portuguese School of Group Analysis

Book excerpt: At the time group analysis was emerging in the United Kingdom through the ideas of S. H. Foulkes, one of his followers, Eduardo Luís Cortesão, returned to Portugal and founded the Portuguese Society of Groupanalysis, with the first group-analytic Symposium taking place in Estoril, Portugal, in 1970. In this vital new book, an impressive collection of contributors demonstrate how group analysis in Portugal has always embraced the relational paradigm that has become central to contemporary psychoanalysis. The Portuguese school of groupanalysis, through several of its senior members, has contributed to many of the organizations responsible for the development of group analysis, such as EGATIN, IAGP and GASi. Nevertheless some of the concepts and variations of the Portuguese school of groupanalysis tend to be unknown to the English speaker. Their focus is on the "pattern", allowing transformation of each patient’s personal matrix, working through primitive relational failures and paving the way to new beginnings, always in a transgenerational group context. This book will be of tremendous importance to psychotherapists working in group analysis around the world.