Entries by @dmin

The impact of the female analytic group leader’s gender as revealed in dreams of male members: a clinical exploration

Abstract The psychoanalytic literature has always believed that the sex of the therapist is not a significant variable in treatment. Eroticized transference has positive potential, facilitating, restorative and invigorating. “Eroticized” capture the plasticity of sexuality, and creative ways of human beings who can be loved, and eroticize

Group and women’s dreams

Abstract The paper I present to you refers in a certain way to a traditional work: the process of finding and giving sense to some recurrent dreams in long-term psychoanalytically oriented therapeutic women’s groups. But I propose to you, though not being in the specific setting, to “treat“ now these dreams in the mental attitude […]

The Bodily Dimension in Groups of Children

Abstract The work is based on the results of a clinical research project made over a fifteen year period on open groups in which children of different age groups participated. In group with children, the prevailing language is the primitive one of body language, whose alphabet, represented by sensory and motor functions, directly addresses the […]

Psychoanalytic supervision and consultancy: promoting containment and support in institutions

Abstract In conjunction with personal analysis and theory/technique seminars, clinical supervision represents one of the three pillars of psychoanalytic training. Since several years, however, ‘supervision’ is also a term which describes consulting for staff groups in health and social institutions, a practice standing at the crossroad between training and consultancy, offered to teams more and […]

A trans-cultural approach to clinical practice with migrants and their children in Europe and worldwide

Abstract To adapt our care devices to the migrants and to their children is a major challenge in the European society and in the current world where the migrations are varied, numerous and sometimes violent. This text presents a model of welcome and care based on the psychoanalytical clinic and on the anthropology, starting from […]

The use of medication groups for the treatment of patients with mayor mental illnesses

Abstract Medication group sessions may provide both an efficient use of time and effective treatment for chronically and severely ill patients. Such sessions may help patients avoid episodes of decompensation and enhance patient compliance with medication treatment. The group process can offer patients education, mutual support, practice in socialization, and a decrease in feelings of […]

Discovering Time and Place

Abstract The importance of place and displacement, represented in the mind as a clinical problem, is emphasized in this article. The movement takes on a double meaning, on the one hand that of metonymy, the other of spatial dislocation. The place and ‘built-in sense of self as an element of identity formation’. The attachment  theory […]

Psychoanalytical field and process

Abstract The conception of a psychoanalytical process derives from the mental models within which we operate. The epistemological perspective of mental phenomena considers emotionality to be the source of meaning for links and the seed of the thoughts which will develop the thinking aparatus. The elaboration task lies on the ways of processing emotional experiences […]

Research on the gender in the composition of a workshop of photography for schizophrenics, its role in the therapeutic efficiency

Abstract  The present research studies the effects of the gender, in a workshop of expression of a photolanguage type within schizophrenic adults. The initial question was the one of a possible influence of the composition of the groups of therapy, in terms of gender, during the observed processes What is the incidence of the distribution […]

Bus as therapy group setting metaphor: Lista de Espera, a journey inside the group

Abstract Bus as therapy group setting metaphor: Lista de Espera, a journey inside the group. Abstract-This work aims to analyze the film “Lista de espera”, from the perspective of group dynamics working among the passengers of a bus station. The interest is placed on the foundation of the group and the conflict that is generated […]

Dream telling as a request for containment – approaching dreams intersubjectively

Abstract The dream as a means of access to the contents of the individual and unconscious element in the psychoanalytic discipline is revisited in the light of inter-factor, considering the functions it performs within the group context, with particular reference to the nature of communication and relational request . Food for thought comes from clinical […]

A ten moons journey: Women groups and birth support

Abstract Today women are more and more exposed to a stressed way of managing their pregnancy and to a cultural contest dominated by birth fear and by the expectations for the newborn health. These fears dominate many pregnant women’s brain and emotions causing a rising in the stress hormone production. This causes a chronic stress […]

Group psychotherapies: new answers to new questions

Abstract Group for the Recovery of Functions wants to be a new therapeutic resource available to operators, with its specificity. Specificity which consists not only of a group setting as a scenario that generates symbols i.e. a place where it is possible to conceive of what was until then inconceivable but also of limited time, […]

Dreaming and Thinking in the Group

Abstract If we consider the group and the individual as different points of a continuum, the commonly accepted ontological dichotomy between the individual and the group will become obsolete, from the moment that specifically human individuality will be seen in relational terms, resulting in an encounter not only between different individuals but also an encounter […]

The physical space to the psychic space: the shark and the journey of the group

Abstract The discussion deals with the construction of a psychic space that borns by uses real parts of the room as a mental setting of the therapist. The article describes a fundamental issue, common to the setting of child psychotherapy (both group and individual): the importance of physical space, represented by the child’s movements. This […]

From Trauma to Memory The “internal group” of origin and belonging in migrant children

Abstract The intertwining between identity and memory in young underage immigrants is examined through a series of sessions that took place in a Welcome Centre. In the specific situation that involves children occupied in a migratory transit, the construction of the individual memory finds itself engaged on two fronts, as it implies not only a […]

A model of group psychoterapy for persons with cronic mental illness

Abstract Significant advances in the pharmacotherapy of many major psychiatric syndromes occurred in the final decade of the last millennium. However, medications neither proved to be an ultimate cure nor did they eliminate the human suffering attendant with these illnesses. As a consequence, a great number of individuals remain significantly impaired by their illness. Persons […]

Psyche and enviroment

Abstract The psyche, in the totality of conscious and unconscious processes, is revealed through the image, thought, and language, and within the group phenomena in relation with the environment. Within this framework are the concepts of protomental and psychoid, respectively, in Bion and Jung, as well as the implications of transference and countertransference, but also […]

Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytical Field: the experience of alterity

Abstract Freud postulated that going through “an experience of the unconscious” is the only possible way of becoming an analyst. Psychoanalysis is a method, an asymmetric device that carries in its core the seed of the interplay of relationships of which this experience consists. It is a novel form of social link that promotes tan […]

Women in groups in Italy today and yesterday. Social change and inner transformations in three decades

Abstract Author’s reference theory As group Psychoanalyst the author refers to Ferdinando Vanni’s Interactive Group Theory (1988, 1992). In F. Vanni’s theory Interactive groups are characterized by interactional communicative exchanges among participant. In these exchanges an “interactive” self emerges: the “self-in-others”. This “self-in-others” presents itself as an indifferentiated Self which allows parts of personality to […]

Of monsters, spirits, soldiers and the power of imagination. A psychoanalytic lens on Victor Erice’s “The spirit of the beehive” (El espíritu de la colmena)

Abstract My article on Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) looks at the ambivalent fantasies of two Spanish young girls, excited by the screening of the film Frankenstein in their village town-hall. I offer an interpretation of their fantasies in the context of those children’s psychological development, of their relationship with emotionally distant […]