Encounters with projective identification: Utilising group debrief sessions to contain student teachers’ anxiety
Abstract
Teaching experience ‒ in face-to-face, online, and blended educational contexts ‒ provides student teachers with the opportunity to participate in low, mid, and high-resourced schools, in preparation for their integration into the South African educational system. Often, while at low-resource schools, student teachers report feeling ineffectual, frustrated, despondent, and overwhelmed, leading to criticism of the programme, requests to transfer to high-resource alternatives, and threats to disengage from teaching experience. Drawing on Klein’s concept of projective identification, and Bion’s idea of container-contained, we understand such communications as expressions of overwhelming anxiety, highlighting an urgent need for intervention. To address this need, group debrief was incorporated into teaching experience, in an attempt to enable anxiety to be tolerated, worked through, and understood, rather than evacuated defensively via projective identification. Pre- and post-debrief questionnaires were employed to track containment facilitated with fifty (50) final (4th) year student teachers. Though some resistance was expected and noted, the outcomes were largely positive, with most students reporting improved emotional states, reduced anxiety, and feelings of empowerment.
Downloads
References
Auld, Sharon. 2022a. “Case-based learning as a pedagogical strategy to explore the social embeddedness of trauma.” digiTAL 2022 - International conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning in the Digital age, Umhlanga: South Africa, 1 and 2 December 2022. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366733432_digiTAL_2022_Conference_Proceedings.
Auld, Sharon. 2022b. “Role-play as a pedagogical strategy to assist postgraduate psychology students engage with the social embeddedness of trauma.” Critical Arts: 1‒20. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2022.2143832.
Auld, Sharon and Duncan Cartwright. 2018. “Hiding behind culture: Using social defense systems to explore the malaise of the ‘old guard’ in post-apartheid South Africa.” Psychology in Society 56: 23‒45. https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-8708/2018/n56a2.
Billow, Richard M. 2000. “Relational Levels of the ‘Container-Contained’ in Group Therapy.” Group 24(4): 243‒259. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41718947.
Bion, Wilfred. 1959. “Attacks on linking.” In Melaine Klein today: Developments in theory and practice. Part Two: Projective identification, edited by Elizabeth Bott Spillius, 87‒101. Published in association with the Institute of Psycho-analysis, London.
Bion, Wilfred. 1962. Learning from Experience. New York: Basic Books.
Boler, M. 1999. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge.
Boostrom, R. 1998. “‘Safe Spaces’: Reflections on an Educational Metaphor.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 30(4): 408‒437.
Boyle, Mary. 2022. “Power in the power threat meaning framework.” Journal of Constructivist Psychology 35(1): 27‒40. https://doi.org/10.1080/10720537.2020.1773357.
Council on Higher Education. 1997. Education White Paper 3: A Programme for the Transformation of Higher Education. https://www.che.ac.za/publications/legislation/education-white-paper-3-programme-transformation-higher-education.
Davis, D. and M. Steyn. 2012. “Teaching Social Justice: Reframing Some Common Pedagogical Assumptions.” Perspectives in Education 30(4): 29‒38.
Foucault, M. 2000. “For an Ethic of Discomfort.” In Essential Works of Foucault, 1954‒1984. Volume III. Edited by J. D. Faubion 3, 443‒448. New York: The New Press.
Hafsi, M. 2011. “The container, contained and in-between: A review of the containment concept and its vicissitudes.” Annual reports of the graduate school of Nara University 16.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575‒599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066.
Haselau, Tracey and Lisa Saville Young. 2022. “Co-Constructing Defensive Discourses of Service-Learning in Psychology: A Psychosocial Understanding of Anxiety and Service-Learning, and the Implications for Social Justice.” Teaching of Psychology 50(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/00986283221077206.
Kernberg, Otto F. 2018. “Projection and projective identification developmental and clinical aspects.” In Projection, identification, projective identification, 93‒115. Routledge.
Kerr, J. 2014. “Western Epistemic Dominance and Colonial Structures: Considerations for Thought and Practice in Programs of Teacher Education.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3: 83‒104.
Klein, Melanie. 1935. “A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 16: 145‒174.
Klein, Melanie. 1946. “Notes on some schizoid mechanisms.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27: 99‒110.
Klein, Melanie. 1957. Envy and gratitude; a study of unconscious sources. Oxford, England: Basic Books.
Nathans, Shelley and Milton Schaefer. 2017. Couples on the couch: Psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy and the Tavistock model. Vol. 87. Taylor & Francis.
Nielsen, Arthur C. 2019. “Projective identification in couples.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 67(4): 593‒624.
Nolan, Andrea and Tebeje Molla. 2018. “Teacher professional learning through pedagogy of discomfort.” Reflective Practice 19(6): 721‒735. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2018.1538961. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2018.1538961.
Ogden, Thomas. 2018. Projective identification and psychotherapeutic technique. Routledge.
Sandler, Joseph. 1993. “On communication from patient to analyst: Not everything is projective identification.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 74(6): 1097.
South African Government. 1996. Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201409/green-paper-higher-education-transformation0.pdf.
Spillius, Elizabeth Bott. 2014. “Clinical experiences of projective identification.” In Clinical lectures on Klein and Bion, 59‒73. Routledge.
Thompson, N. 2003. Promoting equality: Challenging discrimination and oppression. 2nd Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zembylas, Michalinos. 2015. “‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education.” Ethics and Education 10(2): 163‒174. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2015.1039274. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2015.1039274.
Copyright (c) 2023 Sharon Auld, Tracey Haselau

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This journal is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.
Authors, copyright holders, may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors' publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal homepage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: This is an electronic version of an article published in SAJHE, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX “XXX", DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://www.journals.ac.za/index.php/SAJHE) may be found.
Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University Institutional Repository SUNScholar.
Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.
The following license applies:
Attribution CC BY-NC-ND 4.0