ABSTRACT
This chapter looks to pioneers in psychoanalysis and group analysis and to current practitioners to see how principles of transference and countertransference can be called on to help people find themselves and one another in therapeutic groups. These principles, like their associated constructs of projection, identification and projective and introjective identification, have origins and development coterminous with psychoanalysis, so there is an extensive literature. Transference and countertransference can be profound resources. They provide principles of clinical demarcation between the three most widely practised models of group therapy. Freud's Classical theory involved, as we will see below, a restricted definition of transference that was believed to arise only between therapist and patient. The past is drawn into the dynamic present through transference that emerges inevitably through the shadows cast in the group by its members histories. Foulkes and Anthony described their model of group therapy as a transference situation in which past and present must meet.
