Since the end of the Second World War (WWII), over half of all countries have experienced prolonged and mass human rights violations (hereafter 'violations') due to major armed conflict or autocratic/ dictatorial regimes (Marshall & Cole, 2008). These violations include extreme life events and denial of civil/political rights; the human cost of such acts is hard to measure, and spans generations (Kemp, 2016;Merrouche, 2011). Researchers have tried to understand the psychological impact of such violations, and factors that may foster survivors' resilience and/or vulnerability (Johnson & Thomson, 2008;Pitman et al., 2012). This research takes a predominantly intra-/ interpersonal focus, often ignoring the relevance of the social context within which violations occur (Silove, 1999;Summerfield, 2008), and the fact that coping strategies are often inherently social (Slavin et al., 1991). Indeed, people experiencing violations frequently gain much-needed resources from their social group memberships (e.g., their family group; Lee & Anh, 2012), but such groups may also be a source of stress (Swartzman et al., 2016), and even simultaneously supportive and stressful (Kellezi et al., 2019). Hence, there is a need for a theoretical approach that can conceptualise the complex interactions within social groups in stressful contexts: a perspective offered by the Social Identity Approach (SIA;Tajfel, 1978;Tajfel & Turner, 1985).

Therapeutic alliance is a central concept in psychotherapeutic work. The relationship between the therapist and the patient plays an important role in the therapeutic process and outcome. In this article, we investigate how therapists work with disaffiliation resulting from enduring disagreement while maintaining an orientation to the psychotherapeutic project at hand. Data come from a total of 18 sessions of two dyads undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy and is analyzed with conversation analysis. We found that collaborative moves deployed amidst enduring disagreement can assist the therapist in furthering the disagreement as part of the ongoing psychotherapeutic project. Relying on their collaborative format, therapists utilize collaborative moves to temporarily mend the disaffiliation without necessarily changing their position and re-affiliating with the patient. We show how the relation between the therapist and the patient gets transformed in the moment-by-moment work accomplished in the psychotherapeutic talk.

In psychotherapy, the envisioned change in patient's feelings, thoughts and behaviour o en targets their self-experience. is threatens simultaneously the patient's face and the therapeutic relation. We focus on face-threats in transformative question-answer sequences where therapists question the patient's face by shi ing the focus of talk on patient's self and in response patients confront the dilemma of having to choose between saving their face or the relation with the therapist. Data come from 47 video recorded psychotherapy sessions conducted in Albanian language. Analysis shows that patients resist the transformation but only a er making considerable e orts to save both their face and the therapeutic relation. We conclude that challenging the patient's self-experience is a delicate task in terms of the therapeutic relation.