First published in Italian in 1995, Group is no ordinary manual for group facilitiators - at least, not the kind English-speaking practitioners might anticipate . [Neri's] book draws fruitfully on the thinking of Bion and Foulkes, Lewin and Anzieu, and a wide range of Italian, French, German and North and South American analysts. But it is also distinguished by a wealth of references to sources well outside the specialist fields of individual and group analysis: to Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin, Isabel Allende and Marshall McLuhan, Montaigne, Durkheim, Sartre, Bunuel, Pasolini, Dostoyevsky, Schonberg, Borges, Cavafy, Canetti, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein . The book is structured in such a way that the reader can easily cross-reference - there is a fascinating glossary, and there are appendices containing interviews with the author, and textboxes, which usefully take the place of footnotes and provide timely explanations of key concepts as they arise - and this structure captures something both of the sequential nature of the group experience (groups like books unfold over time) and the presence of simultaneous phenomena . This is a book to return to; it invites us not to turn away from its own difficulties and the discomfort these can induce in the reader eager for a too purely intellectual sense. - European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health.
Group