In "GROUP," Therapy Is A Blend Of Entertainment And Education
A Hillsdale psychoanalyst helps produce a TV pilot that puts the spotlight on group therapy.
Screen shot from GROUP
“Most of life takes place in groups,” says Elliot Zeisel, a psychoanalyst and leader in the field of group psychotherapy. Zeisel’s statement comes up in a conversation about GROUP, the project he’s involved in. A pilot filmed with actors playing members of a psychoanalytic group in New York City, it’s based on Dr. Irvin Yalom’s The Schopenhauer Cure, a novel that highlights the effectiveness of group treatment.
Zeisel, who has an alphabet of certifications after his name (PhD, CGP, DFAGPA) is an in-demand teacher in the field of group psychotherapy. He’s trained hundreds of professionals in the theory and practice of group psychotherapy and modern psychoanalytic theory. He and his wife, also a psychoanalyst, have had a home in Hillsdale, New York for 36 years. They’re both painters, and now he can add actor and producer to all those letters following his name.
GROUP, which is available in seven segments on YouTube, began unsurprisingly, at an American Group Psychological Association conference three years ago. Zeisel initaited a conversation with Alexis Lloyd, a NY-based French filmmaker who had optioned the rights to The Schopenhauer Cure. Lloyd, son of a psychoanalyst, had a deep curiosity about group therapy, and the conversation between the two men soon turned into a collaboration on a pilot with actors playing patients, based on scripted characters.
Watch a segment, and you’d be excused for thinking you’re viewing a real group session. Lloyd had worked with each of actors, giving them a backstory and a nudge about who each was going to have a conflict with. In filming, the actors responded as some blend of the person and the character the play. Zeisel was “type” cast as the group therapist.
Filming took three days, with each of the two sessions done in three takes of one-and-a-half hours each, the time most psychodynamic groups run. In filming, the actors agreed to abide by group principles: avoid socializing, maintain confidentiality, and to talk about their thoughts and feelings as they’re aware of them in service to understanding themselves and those in the room.
“We want to help bring group treatment into the sunlight,” says Zeisel. “It’s often thought of as the stepchild in treatment. It’s an extremely useful treatment modality. The world needs to know about group and its transformative powers.”
There have been several other series based on psychotherapy: HBO’s "In Treatment" and Showtime’s "Couples Therapy." But this, Zeisel says, “is the closest representation of what group feels like that anyone’s ever captured.”
The series was filmed in 2018 and took a year to edit. Now that there’s a trailer and seven short chapters that constitute the pilot for GROUP, Lloyd and Zeisel are trying to attract a large number of views. The goal is to get a following and the support of a streaming service to fund the making of the entire series.
GROUP is riveting, illuminating, and truthfully, a bit voyeuristic to watch. And it’s attracting an audience. In a little more than two weeks, it had garnered almost 19,000 viewers. Among other reactions, watching people sitting in a room together less than six feet apart elicits a kind of nostalgia for the days when we could gather in groups — therapeutic or not — without a second thought. But, as Zeisel says, we learn and grow in the group settings of our families, friendships, school and work. The pilot is useful in understanding how group therapy offers an emotional education and a laboratory to work on relationships.
Zeisel, who left New York for his Hillsdale home after spending eight days in Mount Sinai being treated for COVID-19, is still holding his group sessions, but on Zoom. Although he played the part of Dr. Ezra Hertzfeld in the pilot, it’s hard to know how much acting he really did.
“Group treatment trains you to live at the end of your emotional seat,” he says. “I played it as I am.”
