Abstract

This paper considers those particular pathologies in which the body is thought of as “a psychic object par excellence”, or rather, as the only psychic object that is the locus where the subject’s unity is recognized. I am referring to patients who are unable, for various reasons, to mentalize and transform perceptive and sensorial experience into emotional meaningfulness, and instead encapsulate it within corporeity. Emotions and affects are experienced as enemies that must be kept at a distance and the subject is held prisoner in a continuous, concrete sense of experiential immediateness. Being in a therapeutic group setting is what this kind of patient needs, since the group is an immediate experience of the world and its complexity. The group is able to activate a particular and meaningful mirroring function, in that the group is the matrix that fosters an initial meaningful organizing moment of the psyche.

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