Paper short abstract

Professional Development Groups at a counselling psychology programme in Bengaluru are trained in autobiographical sharing and active listening. I follow how the threefold work of witnessing (writing, reading aloud and listening) through splitting/projection shapes trainees' professional selves.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic material from a counselling psychology programme in Bengaluru, India. Professional Development (PD) Groups ask trainees to deepen their "counsellor identities" by writing themed reflective essays about their own lives and reading them aloud to a cohort of peers, asked to listen without judgement. Self-awareness, trust, and reflective writing are counted as learning outcomes, and trainees are graded on their willingness to be vulnerable. How might eliciting raw emotions in a moderated setting illuminate the dynamics of (de)polarisation? I take vulnerability not as passive exposure but as a deliberate casting of light on the self, an act that exists only once witnessed, and I disaggregate that witnessing into three tasks: writing, reading aloud, and listening. Writing distances trainees from themselves; reading aloud returns that estranged self through the presence of others; listening familiarises them with selves not their own. Following object relations theory, I read the essay as a part of the self split off, projected onto the group, held, and handed back in a more bearable form. This is the process that elsewhere might harden the line between an "us" and a denigrated other. Here it is deliberately turned the other way, as trainees learn to hold several perspectives at once and to abandon the sense that they alone are complex while everyone else is "black and white." I thus follow how affect is organised toward division or toward recognition by attending to the ecology of a PD batch.