ABSTRACT
This chapter views that dynamic change in group psychotherapy is effected by an enactive form of free association which term the "flow of enactive engagement". The chapter focuses on ideas expressed long ago by and that placed group free association at the center of the therapeutic action of group analysis and group therapy. It outlines the phenomena of trauma, dissociation, and enactment that have been central to the relational conception of psychopathology and therapeutic action drawing in particular on the work of Philip Bromberg and D. B. Stern. The chapter describes the associations as things that happen in the group rather than the verbal associations of the members, and the group analyst is embedded in the process rather than abstinent or neutral as in the original Freudian conception. It suggests that the engine of a contemporary group psychotherapy is the group's flow into and out of group enactments of traumatic phenomena and states.
