Community Group Analysis: A Post-Crisis Synthesis

This article describes some ideas, theoretical and clinical, related to group treatment of residents in a New York City homeless shelter for mentally ill persons immediately subsequent to the World Trade Center disaster. I provide details concerning this group as it dealt with community-level crises that were both acute, as they related to the World Trade Center disaster, and chronic, as they dealt with the ongoing condition of being mentally ill and homeless. I discuss my experience in the group and the ways that a synthesis of group, interpersonal psychoanalytic, and community psychology principles formed a framework for working through traumatic experiences in this community.