Personal Growth in a Therapeutic Group

“In the book of the renowned psychotherapist O. Nemirinsky, there is a profound, thoughtful analysis of the group psychotherapeutic process as a dynamics of personal changes in participants. There is a new, unconventional perspective on the substantive aspects of this... process. There is an attempt to reach a phenomenological and at the same time strictly scientific level of understanding of what happens to personality at different stages of group development... The author of this small work has gone significantly further than many esteemed Western researchers in group dynamics: he reveals the limitations of approaches that consider group development only in a socio-psychological context, without linking it to individual personal growth... O. Nemirinsky proves an extremely important position both theoretically and practically that there is a certain sequence of actualizing and experiencing personal problems in the group: without addressing the more “earlier” problems, the group cannot help its members productively solve more “later” problems... . .It should be noted that the thoroughness and broad “coverage” of the problem allows the author to go beyond the topic he himself has defined. Firstly, the identified characteristics of therapeutic dynamics and the regularities of personality actualizing its problems can apparently be transferred to the situation of individual psychotherapy, and secondly, the author essentially proposes a model for the periodization of personal growth, which is undoubtedly a fundamentally important position for general psychological theory.” .