“When Group Therapy Went Heavy Meta’”

by Amanda Hess

The New York Times, March 26, 2026  (p. D4)

This perceptive, fascinating, and somewhat unsettling article is a must-read for all group therapists.  It’s about the creation and production of the new movie Group—The Schopenhauer Effect, written and directed by Alexis Lloyd and starring our own Dr. Elliot Zeisel.

Loosely inspired by Irvin Yalom’s novel The Schopenhauer Cure, the film opened to sell-out audiences at the 13th Street Quad Cinema in NYC. It received rave reviews by members of our professional community. The film brings the world’s attention to group therapy, and specifically puts it center stage for the NYT readership.

Ms. Hess, who is a journalist and critic-at-large for the New York Times, takes an outsider’s look at the movie. As a critic, Ms. Hess’s somewhat gothic and darker view, however, may be disappointing to the filmmakers and their fans. If they were hoping for another rave review, this wasn’t it.

The film centers on Lloyd’s experience immersed in one of Dr. Zeisel’s real-life therapy groups.  Ms. Hess describes the movie as “a therapeutic ouroboros (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon devouring its own tail) in which actors became patients, patients became characters, his psychoanalyst became a star….” In reality, it’s even more complicated than that. Ms. Hess states off-handedly, “Dr. Zeisel recommended two of his longtime group patients for roles, one of whom, Gabriela Kohen, is also an analyst.” This fact seems ironic. Aside from other questionable aspects of the arrangement, one might wonder, “What happened to confidentiality?”

Another fascinating fact is that Lloyd’s father was also an analyst. Ms. Hess writes wryly, “a psychoanalyst’s son made a film that pulled him into an endless vortex of sessions.”  As it turned out, this was not exactly what happened. Lloyd’s stay in group therapy wasn’t endless; it was time-limited.  Ms. Hess notes further in the article, “As the filmmaker converted his apartment into a fictional therapy group, he terminated his treatment with the real group.” Ms. Hess asks the reader a rhetorical question: “When a director and a psychoanalyst make a movie about therapy, who is really leading the group?”

These and other significant insights appear throughout the article. Let’s form a community Zoom discussion group to discuss all of them and their implications for AGPA.