Intervention with Adolescents in Germany: The Group as a Reflexive Tool

Abstract

Group Social Work does not only mean knowing the most significant group treatment processes. It is necessary to understand the experiences, expectations and motivations that each participant as an individual brings to the group and that will certainly play an important role throughout the course of the group and individual processes. This approach, developed in treatment at the German program Freiwillige soziale Jah, is relevant in a family monograph since it offers the possibility of understanding participants as human beings immersed and interwoven in diverse relationships and as main actors in vitally important psychosocial processes. Throughout the article, the family dynamics and evolutionary aspects of the program’s participants are considered. This description is followed by a social environmental analysis and ends by reviewing the professional’s attitude towards group intervention, as well as the view that the professional uses to construct the subjects with whom s/he works. The reflections shared in this article are intended to point out the useless separation often made between an individual and his or her context and underline the importance of activating dialogic tools that, distanced from coercive premises, result in relationships based on trust and cooperation.