The authors assert that one may view intractable political violence as a genre of ‘emplotted’ action in which society enacts, writes and organizes its narratives into a symbolic system and a mode of historical explanation and a configuration of group relations, which have a storytelling capacity of their own. We demonstrate that in Northern Ireland there is a constant making and narrating of history and that this repetitive and reciprocal ritual of reliving history is a means of managing a profound psychic trauma and displacement which engenders and entrenches political violence, that profoundly affects therapists and their group members.

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Conducting group psychotherapy in a situation of intractable conflict such as Northern Ireland activates turbulent emotional dilemmas within psychotherapists and group members alike. Professional practice and therapeutic zeal must struggle daily to survive the stark encounter with the reality of a regressive and primitive psychology and on occasion may succumb to atavistic tendencies, dragging relationships down to primitive levels and leaving connections broken. In this article, three group therapists describe their countertransference struggles when leading such groups. They meet in a psychosocial setting in which the risk to one's psyche parallels the risk to one's life and limb. The countertransference experienced here is dark, indeed identified by one author as not unlike Dante's Inferno. They describe how understanding their personal countertransference enables them to survive emotionally even though it may not always lead to the survival of their groups. The effect of those struggles also troubled the act of writing itself, making cooperation difficult on occasion, a mirror of the external social matrix.

The prospect of resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland (Ulster) is illusory unless one considers the Ulster situation as a violent expression of separation-individuation dynamics in the whole of the British Isles: this article attempts to locate the war in the context of regional separatist impulses and their repression by an archaic grandiose self structure in the centralist political psyche. The paper attempts to elaborate some of the particular psychological features of the conflict by reference to a group session which occurred immediately after the October 1993 Shankill Road, Belfast, bomb explosion. It is asserted that a dream presented by one of the group members gives clear insight into the psychological anxieties and preoccupations structured into the Ulster state at its inception and which continue to fuel the violence.