Curative Factors in a Male Felony Offender Group

Curative factors or therapeutic events beneficial to group members are a major concern in group psychotherapy. Yalom (1975) writes extensively on curative factors in his well-known text. Corsini and Rosenberg (1955), in their study of 300 pre-1955 articles, identified 175 statements which they subsumed under nine categories, or curative factors. Yalom and his colleagues (Liebermann et al., 1972; Yalom et al., 1967, 1975) researched the relative importance of curative factors as perceived by group members. Based partly on these works, Yalom identified 60 curative items which he clustered into 12 curative factor categories: altruism, group cohesiveness, uni-versality, interpersonal learning (input), interpersonal learning (output), guidance, catharsis, identification, family reenact-ment, self-understanding, instillation of hope, and existential factor. Subjects in the Yalom et al. study (1975) were well-educated, middle-socioeconomic-class outpatients in long-term therapy. Using the 60 items and a Q-sort method, group members ranked interpersonal learning (input), catharsis, and cohesiveness as the three important curative factors, and family reenactment, guidance, and identification as least important. Other researchers using Yalom’s method have reported similar findings with various kinds of groups in various