"Using Groups to Help People" provides a clear and comprehensive guide to the principles of group work by a leading figure in the field.

Preface to the Second Edition. Part I: Thinking About Groups. 1. The Therapist's Overall Purpose, and Instrumental or Sub-Purposes. 2. Some Basic Characteristics of Groups and How They Bear on a Group's Capacity to Help or To Do Harm. 3. A Framework for Organising One's Thinking About Events As They Unfold In A Group. Part II: Planning, and Pre-group Tasks: What Needs to be Done Before a Group Starts. 4. Initial Planning: Fitting Type of Group and Leadership Approach to the Patient of Clinet Population. 5. Taking the Work Setting Into Account. 6. Further Planning: Making Detailed Decisions About the Structure of the Group and the Approach One Intends to Adopt as Conductor of the Group. 7. Composing a group: Selecting and Preparing Members. 8. Summary: A Diagrammatic Representation of Successive Steps in Planning. Part III: Thinking and Taking Action During the Life of a Group 9. The Internal 'Think-work' Undertaken by the Therapist: Listening, Observing and Forming Understandings of What is Happening in the Group and for Individuals. 10. Intervening in Groups: why, when and how. 11. How Individuals Can Acquire Significant Personal Gains Through Participating in a Group, and How a Therapist Can Help. 12. 'Problem' Persons and Situations in Groups, and Strategies for Responding to Them. 13. The Formative, Established, and Termination Phases in Therapeutic groups: What to Expect in Each. 14. Therapists' Errors and How to Retrive Them. Part IV Learning from Experience. 15. After the Group Ends, Reflecting on the Planning Decisions Which One Has Made, On Events in the Group, and on One's Own Participation as Conductor. 16. Considering the Relevance of Points Made in This Book to Other Kinds of Groups and Groupings. 17. Undertaking Research On One's Own Groups. Bibliography. Index.