Group psychotherapy is perhaps a misleading term and the concept of the group psychotherapies probably better represents the broad range of psychological treatments in psychiatry in which the group process is an essential component: from psychotherapy with a married couple to the large community group meeting in a psychiatric hospital. Group psychotherapy most commonly refers to the long-term treatment of neurotic out-patients in small groups, and this will be my main focus. Marital and family therapy have their own distinctive literatures, while the therapeutic community has been well covered in a previous column (Mandelbrote, 1979).