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Unique to group therapy is the number of objects stimulating transference feelings and defenses against them. Transference manifestations, particularly projection and hostility, are likely to be challenged by other members who then express the feelings which have been denied. In heterogeneous groups, a member is unlikely to find support for the defenses he habitually uses. This condition has given rise to situations charged with anxiety, especially with a new member, and technical measures to deal with such occasions are described. Identification may lessen the growth of an individual's personality, not encourage it, when the object is the healthy aspect of the mature therapist or fellow member. Identification with the aggressor, however, tends to stunt the personality. Such defensive identification becomes impossible in a group of different kinds of people.
'The maturity of a therapy group and of its different members is proportionate to the degree to which differentiations are tolerated, encouraged, and expected from its members. It is equally proportionate to the degree to which identifications with the aggressor … are perceived and discarded in exchange for more mature, self-accepting, and self-affirming processes.'
The heightened stimulation inherent in group therapy facilitates the dissolving of ego defenses by mutual interpretation. The object of the transference in the group is less important than the nature of the emotions which from the transference and which represent in a relatively modified form the past of the individual. Defenses are 'growing products that can be changed conspicuously in therapy'. Group therapy tends to activate latent conflicts so that they can be analyzed; though helpful in character disorders, it may disturb the schizophrenic unduly.