ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what happens to a hypothetical affective learning group in the context of a conference on loss and trauma within the family. It focuses on how the individuals, and the group as whole, express aspects of the clinical and theoretical material presented during the conference through projective processes: transference, counter-transference, splitting and projective identification. The chapter examines the capacity of the leaders to hold and contain anxieties about being in a group of comparative strangers, and exposed to confronting and distressing clinical material. It provides a brief account of how an affective learning group might function in an attempt to grapple with clinical and theoretical material in a two-day conference. The chapter explains that some occasions where the group was under the sway of basic assumption mentalities; where the group’s anxieties and defences against that anxiety interfered with the task of learning.
