ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two visits to Kosovo by two members of the Tavistock Clinic staff, for the purpose of chairing the final assessment presentations of students on a programme of Psycho–Social Trauma Counselling and offering some teaching on the programme. It describes the shared and different experiences, and considers in particular the position of the visiting “expert” working with an indigenous student population from a country itself recently traumatized by war. Many of these students had themselves been refugees during the war, and were training in order to provide a basic capacity to respond to the trauma of both “returnees” and those who had stayed behind. The psycho–social function of the system of relationships which constitutes the training structure is to act as a well bounded “ego” capable of accepting, processing and making at least some sense of these primitive emotional processes.
