ABSTRACT
This section contains papers that describe how children and families can be helped in groups. Understanding group process and the dynamic of groups has been developed by two psychoanalysts, Bion and Foulkes. Bion understood groups to be using very early mechanisms to cope with anxiety and conflict such as splitting, denial, projection and projective identification. He saw groups as either working groups that were attending to the task or anti-task basic assumption groups. Where the latter occurred, what could be observed was ‘fight/flight’ behaviour or ‘pairings’ or a ‘dependency’ group. By this he meant that members of the group might engage in fights, arguments, might try and avoid issues, perhaps by not attending (flight); or they might make intense relationships in pairs, or they might become very dependent on the group leader.
