ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the concepts of transference, counter-transference, projection, and containment to describe clinical phenomena seen on the couch that highlight the results of a human mind exposed to violence. Imagined take-overs or transferences are rooted in fundamentally bad experiences in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. The experience of being dominated and oppressed by the other side is both real and imagined in Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland society, organizations and individuals provide few opportunities for members to experience trust, particularly in the face of alternative or contrasting belief systems. In the minds of many people in Northern Ireland the peace process seems based more on the needy and greedy appetites of politicians than it is on the real casualties of human destructiveness. The primitive aggressive impulses that were dormant in the Protestant state of mind and that underlie all troubled minds in Northern Ireland.
