PicassoSaltimbanchi

Group and dream in departments of organic illness. The homogeneous group in the hospital department

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Abstract

So that what seems significant to us, relative to the theme of the groups iconic and oneiric production, concerns its specific function in the group dealing with organic illness. This function is connected with the need to represent the bodys internal events, to give them a shape and communicable expression, to provide them with a sense which can be shared and mentally represented. The understanding of these representational elements, so important for re-establishing the ties between body and mind and between trauma and rebuilding, may set in hand a process of transformation and evolution. In particular, in the group considered, it was possible to pinpoint levels which were more and more touched by the affections of a central fantasy connected with the neoplastic illness: the annihilating and fragmenting invasion of the tumour, bearer of anxiety of death, corresponds to an early primitive defect, connected with problems of inseparability, which gave rise to an area of ice, devoid of life and absolutely inconceivable, invasive and generating death to the point of persecution, to be ashamed of. The organisation of this fantasy, fostered by dreaming, enables the group to pass from a concrete, symmetrical and specular arrangement, of the Read more

GauguinAnoressia

Therapeutic factors in the psychoanalytically oriented homogeneous group for eating disorders

/in , /by

Abstract

What emerges then is a self that is incomplete or vulnerable, or a self that has either not developed its own functions and objects or has only been to able to do it both by sacrificing, cutting off and isolating the self that is capable of learning from mental pain and by distancing itself from all those objects, including the body, that can instigate that learning experience. For anorexic and bulimic patients, the homogeneous group as Self-Object offers a self-recognition and affective regulation experience that lays the foundations for a process of self-exploration which would otherwise be impossible in people whose very sense of existence feels threatened. If the patients can see the  subjective form of their affective life reflected by others as something shared and therefore meaningful, human, open to communication and hence to Read more