Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations: An Integration of Twelve-Step and Psychodynamic Theory

Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations: An Integration of Twelve-Step and Psychodynamic Theory is a work by Philip J. Flores (2007).

Core claims

• Flores’s book is not a manual for running addiction groups but a sustained argument that the group itself functions as a transitional object—a psychodynamic container that performs the same compensatory function the substance once held, thereby making Twelve-Step fellowship and object-relations theory complementary rather than competing frameworks.
• The integration Flores proposes dissolves the false war between psychodynamic insight and Twelve-Step practice by demonstrating that the Twelve Steps are already performing ego-structural repair—building self-regulation, affect tolerance, and relational capacity—through mechanisms psychoanalytic theory can name but did not invent.
• By grounding addiction in attachment failure rather than moral deficiency or mere neurochemistry, Flores repositions the group therapist not as an authority dispensing interpretation but as a reliable selfobject whose consistency catalyzes the internalization processes that addiction itself arrested.

Related questions

• How does Flores’s concept of the group as transitional selfobject compare with Cody Peterson’s claim in The Shadow of a Figure of Light that the archetype of the Alcoholic itself functions as a symbol of the coniunctio oppositorum—are these descriptions of the same phenomenon at different levels of analysis?
• In what ways does Flores’s attachment-based model of addiction complement or challenge Edward Edinger’s prediction that a “collective phenomenon” would emerge from Jungian psychology to serve the individuation needs of the masses?
• How might Heinz Kohut’s self psychology, as deployed by Flores to explain addiction as self-structure deficit, intersect with Jung’s understanding of the ego-Self axis as described in Edinger’s Ego and Archetype—do both frameworks describe the same developmental failure from different vantage points?

See also

• Library page: /library/recovery/flores-group-psychotherapy-addicted/

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