The establishment of individual and collective competency in children's groups as a prelude to entry into intimacy, disclosure, and bonding.

This article offers a theory about the evolution of small group systems through a series of stages. It discusses the relationship of these stages to and their effect on the self-other and therapeutic interventive spheres in the long-term group treatment of children. The developmental unfolding is seen as universal to small groups and as operating on an interpersonal and collective level, distinguishable from individual psyches and close dyadic bonds but influenced by them. On an isomorphic level the group stages contain emotive, cognitive, and interactive themes and processes that parallel and evoke those of the bonding and work processes. As such, the group dynamic provides an enabling matrix and a mirror for the other goings on in the member-therapist encounter. Its pacing and its progressions and regressions appear to correspond with those of the development of the transitional space and therapeutic culture of the group. Like the other articles in the symposium, this one offers specific examples in which the three spheres intersect and are integrated.