ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the importance of transference and counter-transference in group psychotherapy and discusses their role in psychotherapy in general. The group situation sometimes changes not the phenomenon of the transference displacement but the manner in which it exhibits itself. In psychoanalysis the analyst gradually becomes the focus of all of the patient's transference phenomena: mother, father, siblings and significant others. Transference uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with these objects. The co-therapists were also able to fruitfully examine their individual level counter-transference needs, which the group pressure aroused and successfully exploited to serve the forces of resistance rather than to foster therapeutic insight. An important way, in which counter-transference in the group differs from individual psychotherapy, is that it can be more difficult to identify counter-transference towards a single member.
