HISTORY OF CREATIVE AGGRESSION THERAPY

As the innovator of Creative Aggression Therapy,one of the roots of the approach is way of confronting, fair fighting, and pressuring for changes.

Dr. George R. Bach says,

” In the late 1940s, I sought further post-doctoral training as well as personal analysis from the late Adler student Lydia Sicher. Sicher reinforced me in my search of evolving clinical methods to put my “pro-conflict” ideas into practice, especially in group psychotherapy and couples and family therapy. During this time, my own creativity started and,then, my contribution of central significance: showing people how to utilize conflict and aggression creatively.

In my early group therapeutic practice (1945-1953), I developed the clinical art of utilizing group processes — including my leader role — to maximize the mutual aide, the peer-therapeutic effects, in group therapy. In observing mis peer-influence factor,I was repeatedly struck by the relative failure of the nice-guy type of interaction — one might say the classical Rogerian stance of uncritical,unconditional positive regard — to move the patients through their resistances and on to new experiences. In contrast, I noticed that the more critical-aggressive confrontations,even “fights” — between patients themselves and between patients and therapists — tended to initiate new attitudes and opened people up to consider alternative ways of solving conflicts. The introduction of the time-extended “marathon group” schedule in 1963 provided longer-lasting group sessions in which the trust necessary for the open display of aggression had a chance to develop.”