Presentation
Abstract
In this presentation I describe the positions of this issue alternating between the crisis areas of psychiatry and the resources of groups in their various forms, without forgetting to look at the social and clinical Read more
Acknowledgements
The most important acknowledgements in this era of the middle are those intended, “upstream and downstream”, for those people who have helped us exist and find a dreamibility of experience.
Thanks to Stefania Marinelli and Claudio Neri for the continuity of their activities and the development of “works” for a perspective on the care of mental disorders, accompanying the complexity of our growth, with the knowledge of how fortunate we are to be alive, not just biologically, but in living thoughts as they evolve. The gratitude I feel towards them is also linked to my affection for having looked after my “child thoughts”, long ago, with respect and acceptance; it is precisely the acceptance of thoughts, without the fear that they may not be perfect or complete, that allows us to think them again, to “assemble and disassemble” them, exercising doubt in temporarily losing certainties in order to recompose others. Read more
Psychiatry without quality
Abstract
In this paper the authors try to analyse the current state of psychiatry. In particular, they try to highlight the difficulties of institutional cases to manage the new forms of mental suffering, questioning the individual processes of subjectivity and new paradigms of care that are often ineffective in managing these processes. These difficulties find their expression during emphasis on the diagnostic process and uncritical application of “treatment protocols” at the expense of clinical thinking and inter-subjective dimension of care. The authors also query the often ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between law and psychiatry resulting in the lack of distinction between psychological problems and delinquency in an optical Read more
Group Clinical Experiences in Psychiatric Institutional Settings
In this article, several young colleagues, who have been trained in individual and group psychoanalytic contexts, who have all been asked to support activities in the field of highly skilled psychiatry (group psychotherapy) with a “low cost” and implicitly unsafe contract, have tried to outline some features of their experiences of managing groups in psychiatric institutions. Their position is situated on one hand, in a line of continuous progress from their trainers, and on the other appears in a complex and difficult gap between the philosophy of staff working today (eg Evidence-Based Medicine) and psychoanalytic psychotherapy training, which provides radically different concepts, like, for example, the “dreamability” of care processes.
The pathway proposed in this work sees different group psychotherapy experiences, usually with acute patients, often in a separate psychotherapy area in treatment units (the social value of their work and the frequent poverty, which is not only economic, of the institutions should be noted).
Although these contributions may perhaps be a little fragmented (these individual “snapshots” of Read more
The Dream of Prometheus
Abstract
The hypothesis that prompted the following article arose from aconsideration of dreams as important supports for analytical transformation. Beginning with Bionian concepts, the author demonstrates, using as a clinical example a group of patients with severe mental health disorders being treated in Read more
A Shared Journey of Discovery – Psychoanalytic psychotherapy within a psychiatric institution
Abstract
The culture of an institution depends on the way that it enables individuals to use its psychic space; the institution may either foster thinking abilities, or stimulate defensive mechanisms, hindering these abilities by giving prevalence to ideological stances. The psychoanalytic group that I am going to talk about was influenced by the culture of the institution in which it was placed. Thoughts, affections, linguistic and somatic expressions typical of the institution were brought into the group despite being bound by the setting which established its limits and with which it had a dynamic relationship at the same time. In this paper, I set out to demonstrate the importance of adopting a field perspective that ‹‹makes it possible, on the one hand, to comprehend the common mental elements, grouped together, as it were, into a single shared pool, and on the other, understand how each individual contributes›› (Correale, 1991). I underline, moreover, the group’s influence over the analyst who responds to the individual’s communicative strains in a personal manner. The patient’s perspective distances contents which Read more
Therapeutic group as a laboratory of freedom of expression
Abstract
This contribution is inspired by the experience of conducting a therapeutic group for adult patients within a medium security psychiatric community in Milan. Using some session excerpts, a close connection is established between affirmation of identity of individuals and the group, along with freedom of expression, as the Read more
The institution is sinking: is the group the lifeboat?
Abstract
The management of a psychoanalytic group within an institution has specific characteristics. It is a group within a group, similar to a series of concentric circles, and as such is deeply influenced by the institution. Therefore an understanding of the functioning and dynamics of the institution – and of the team – is essential in order to understand the meaning that the group may have within that context.
The significance of the group for patients, but also the meaning of the group for the institution, is important and should not be taken for granted. Particularly if the institution in question seems to work according to persecutory and expulsive mechanisms with perceivable violence, where the main activities offered are “entertainment” and time seems suspended. Read more
A severe and addicted patients group
Abstract
This article aims to described specificities of psycotherapy’s group leading, in a terapeutical community. Community’s characteristics and dynamics, patients peculiarity and severity significantly impact on group’s thought, emotions and trend. We decided to report sessions short extracts to better describe the group’s Read more
A supervising experience within an institution
Abstract
A experience of supervision in a former asylum, transformed about a decade ago into an R.S.D., a residence for the disabled integrating basic assistance and sanitary care. The search for a unified interpretation of the institutional field, its great founders and its implicit rules, as a path to reduce the anxiety and the subsequent block on the vital energy needed in order to change. This energy had been a long time catalyzed by defensive mechanisms indispensable to those who work within the guidelines of the ‘relationship of helping’ in the residential context.
Mild Housing New group forms in contemporary Psychiatry
Abstract
Modern Psychiatry, in spite of appearances and perhaps due to its complexity, is not merely a repository of slogans, sterile thoughts and stereotyped actions, but also a breeding ground for colonies of fresh and vital ideas, which always have found space and develop beneath its mantle.
One rapidly developing area of psychiatric care that seems, in particular, to be going against the dominant and organicistic trend is known in Lombardy as “Mild” Housing.
Especially for mental health workers trained in psychoanalysis Mild Housing presents itself as a valuable ally, due to its particular function of Read more
Multifamily Group Functions as a treatment for psychosis and as an organizational model of mental health services.
Abstract
This paper intends to question how the contemporary predominant medical paradigm can understand and consider psychosis and as it builds its therapeutic care systems.
It is required at the reader to better and deeply analyze everyday experiences of therapies and not only to trust to excessive medicalization (predominant today), inviting him/her to place him/herself in the place of the other, in this case, the one labeled as a “crazy one”.
That’s why we insist on the familiar and social roots of psychosis, contextualizing it as expression of traumas in which the pathogenic reciprocal interdependencies violate the Human Rights of all patients in general as we can observe in multi-familiar groups.
The predominant contemporary medicalized paradigm cannot be sustained as effective, if related to mental states of psychotic conditions of extreme vulnerability. The contributions of Multifamily Psychoanalysis and the perspective of the attention to Human Rights, in the totality of cases, seems to be of greater utility both in practice and in the relationship with patients.
CIPRES´s research team suggests a new conception of the Rehabilitation discipline that may contribute to the epistemological change and, as a Read more
Family field therapy: from the dialogue between generations of therapists to that with contemporary patients. A clinical research project on therapy for individuals and their transgenerational family field
Abstract
This text is dedicated to research on the setting and therapy provided by a research team that worked on the relationship between the extended family mind and the individual, where the former becomes an ectopic storage space for the individual’s content. The team acts as a container for issues that the individuals of the family group Read more
From broken restrictions to new and vital experiences in therapy: from perverse communication to the discovery and identification of the affected’s world
Abstract
This work of proposed family therapy started from the consideration that the model of individual psychoanalysis had not brought any of the family members to retrieve inside themselves and that in the field of group communication, there were no significant results.
A group reading with a literal sense of group was needed. Individuals unconsciously and anonymously represented conflicts and trans-generational family myths.
The basic assumption seemed to embody what Bion calls basic assumption of dependence.
The family was one person.
The stories of the father and the mother reintroduced same experiences.
The female was, in previous generations the guiding and sadist element who reigned. The mothers and grandmothers had raised sons and husbands.
The totally absent analyst, has functioned as a container, put themselves in a patient’sshoes and has developed and proposed a model of Read more
Multifamily psychoanalysis: a story on a theory of mental illness and cure
Abstract
The paper summarizes the core of the theory propounded by the Argentine psychoanalyst Jorge García Badaracco. He saw psychoses as a result of maddening mutual interdependencies having place mainly within the patient’s family environment. The therapeutic setting derived from Badaracco’s theory is described, in which working with multifamily psychoanalysis groups is seen as the most effective way to understand and unweave or dismantle the pathogenic wefts.
The task undertaken in the last decade by a multifamily psychoanalysis group in the Psychoanalytic Center for Research and Assistance (CPSEA in Spanish) is then outlined. Two clinical cases presenting very diverse pathologies, one from the beginning of that decade and the other from its last years, in which García Badaracco’s theory could be corroborated are especially accounted for. In the former, a case of intellectual disability (Down syndrome), it could be clearly seen how the family environment suffocated the patient’s subjectivity. In the latter, the multifamily group enriched itself when forced to act in a sympathetic, therapeutic manner in the face of a social violence situation derived from a painful history of abandonment resulting in traumatic Read more
The Group – Bridge: The experience of a therapeutic group between institutional and social crisis, and group crisis in Greece
Abstract
The work traces the link between social crisis and the management of clinical crises in the therapeutic group of Read more
Border areas: the experience of a group of women migrants. From invisibility to the birth of a dream space
Abstract
This paper aims to tell about group psychotherapy at the Opera San Francesco per i Poveri Clinic. This device is made up of migrant women from different countries, of different ages and who present different clinical conditions, who share one or more traumatic events. Over the years, the group developed the ability to think and subsequently to dream. It Read more
In my mind, in our mind
Abstract
The work starts from an experience of conducting a homogeneous group with eating disorders with the variant of the insertion of a male subject in a group of women.
The therapeutic factors of group dynamics and emotional growth of patients and therapists were Read more