More than one way home - Student raters´ Impressions of interventions and group processes in mentalization based group psychotherapy and group analytic psychotherapy

Abstract Introduction In a controlled psychotherapy outcome study comparing mentalization based treatment in groups (MBT-G) and group analytic treatment (GAP) in a day clinic, both psychodynamic group psychotherapy forms were found to be highly effective (Brand et al., 2016). But how did specific interventions and processes in both groups differ? The present article describes student raters impressions. Methods Twelve psychology students listened to 100 audio recordings of 90 minutes group psychotherapy sessions of GAP(Lorentzen, 2013) and MBT-G (Karterud, 2015). Each session was randomly assigned to two student raters, who were asked to write down their impressions. These rater impressions were analyzed following Mayring (1983). Results Group conductors in MBT-G used more questions, had short shares of speech, used group dynamics and fostered multiple perspectives on issues discussed. Affect perception was stimulated by asking questions. In GAP, conductors used more interpretations, confrontations and supportive interventions, and they had longer shares of speech; handling of affects was based on „allowing to get infected“. Discussion It is hypothesized that symptom reduction in both groups occured via different ways: Following Felsberger (2017), in GAP the pathic (affective contagion) function of interactions was more relevant, while in MBT-G it was the phatic (contact keeping) function. Results are also discussed in relation to previous findings on group processes and interventions.