ABSTRACT
Group therapy and teamwork depend on allowing and using free expression of different voices. Our own personal identity is composed of multiple aspects, based on different sources of identification. The coexistence of various internal working models and identification systems leads to multiplicity. The greater the degree of insecure attachment and trauma in childhood and adolescence, the greater the dissociative mechanisms at play will be. A therapist who is duly acquainted with these processes will be in a better position to identify and effectively deal with multiplicity. Defence mechanisms at play include dissociation and identification with the aggressor. Countertransference not only can involve enactments but requires them in order for the relational disturbance to be identified and ultimately repatterned, as it is only when we find a way of mobilising procedural memory that therapy can begin to touch the parts that the 'pure talking cure' has failed to reach.
