Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group Archivi

Presentation, “Sensoriality, corporeity, and sexuality in the group”

9 July 2012/in Paola Russo, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group, Silvia Corbella, Stefania Marinelli/by @dmin

All the articles in this issue are linked by the common vision of an holistic relationship between psyche and soma. According to this shared idea, as Corbella pointed out in her contribution, sensoriality is “defined both as an intrinsic quality of living things and as a subjective sensory experience. It is connected to both the mind and the body, providing the very foundations of our sexuality, our experience of pleasure and pain and therefore of our being-in-the-world”. The issue begins with Friedman’s contribution about the dream in the group, which is considered as a point of integration between psyche and soma, where the human being is present in his or her completeness. This issue points out that, when dreams originate from constructive preconscious aspects, they lead to new perspectives and also to new synaptic paths. In particular, in its harmonious and detailed work Notes on sensoriality, corporeity and sexuality in the group, Paola Russo Read more

Dreamtelling as a request for containment – Three Uses of Dreams in Group Therapy

9 July 2012/in Robi Friedman, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

Dreams told in a therapeutic setting are challenging events from an experiential and technical perspective. Their contents seem fantastically rich for the one side, but often overwhelmingly chaotic in their implications for relations. Many clinicians lack know-how about how to use the informational and relational possibilities inherent in the complicated act of telling the dream’s report. Dreams told in groups provide additional challenges for all participants. This article is an effort to conceptualize a coherent, unified and consistent dream theory since learning to work with dreams not only enhances understanding of personal and group unconscious processes but may also have a strong impact on the therapeutic culture and working relationship. After differentiating dreaming and dreamtelling I will briefly describe the three uses of dreams – the classical “informative” and more familiar “formative” uses, Read more

Notes on sensoriality, corporeity and sexuality in the group

9 July 2012/in Paola Russo, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

Sensoriality, body and sexuality within the group process were introduced by Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the soma-psyche unit. Jung. Also through some examples coming from the author’s own experience with therapeutic groups, we will deal with the role played by the senses and by non-verbal communication within the group dynamics. The body is first inspected about Read more

Notes on the meaning of clothing in the group

9 July 2012/in Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group, Stefania Marinelli/by @dmin

Abstract

I have pointed out how the analytic process can seep also into less visible fields, causing a continuous change of different dimensions and levels. These dimensions, which are simultaneously coexistent and which convey different meanings, make it harder and more complex the grasp all the different elements that take part in the process of healing and in its setting. Searles said that the face of the analyst during a session is actually the face of the patient (1986). He stated that when the words spoken during a session were not efficient or speakable, a facial expression could visually and scenically show communicable feelings. We think that clothing can be libidinally invested, and that frequently or occasionally it can carry representations and act as an iconic container of elements. These Read more

The group: a privileged mirror for the person

9 July 2012/in Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group, Silvia Corbella/by @dmin

Abstract

Following a brief account of the psyche-soma relationship in the West, the relation between Love and Eros in the male/female relationship is analyzed, through to the moment of procreation. How seeking a child, pregnancy and childbirth have complex consequences today is underlined, there being problematic repercussions for the couple that are different from those of previous generations. Medically assisted procreation is considered, thanks to clinical examples, as are the negative consequences this experience often gives rise to in the parental couple. Homogeneous groups are desirable in cases of assisted procreation, so that the micro-traumas the parents-to-be will need to face can be shared, talked about and dealt with. Working with these couples allows problems to be well highlighted, problems that, less explicitly, every couple experiences when thinking of becoming and then planning to become parents. The group develops into that protected environment where men and women are stimulated and supported in their communication with each other. It is an environment that can accommodate emotional repercussions of bodily events in which the body and mind have been deprived of words. This may, however, occur in the opposite direction: not just from the body to the mind but from the mind to the body also. The group setting helps in understanding how “mental ill-being” can Read more

«Precious pregnancy»: The bodily and emotional perceptions of pregnant women through a qualitative study of their drawings

9 July 2012/in Patrizia Violi, Rosetta Castellano, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group, Silvia Zibellini, Stefania Graziosi/by @dmin

Abstract

In this work a clinical experience using the drawings on the bodily and emotional perceptions during pregnancy is presented. These drawings have been produced by pregnant women attending the Preparation to Birth Courses in a Family Planning Service of Rome. Starting from a screening of over 200 drawings collected during two years, a qualitative comparison has been made among the drawings of those pregnant women not having, to the anamnesis, previous problem pregnancy, and the drawings of those pregnant women whose pregnancy arrived after a series of difficulty (repeated abortions and/or fertility treatments). Our discussion focuses on the importance to gather some indicators of disease about the bodily and emotional perceptions during pregnancy, with the aim to plan specific clinical interventions supporting the transition to parenthood.

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A home for the dragon

9 July 2012/in Donata Miglietta, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

Di Giovanni has called the minimal playing unit “ludeme” (2005). The agglomerates of “ludemes” give life to the scenic thinking by going through the playing body. When Anna Baruzzi (1979) spoke of therapeutic groups with children (developmental age), she described working with emotions as “giving a home to the dragon”. One of the functions of the leader in a therapeutic group of children is to facilitate and witness the process that evolves through the transformation from action into playing and, only later, from playing into words. It is clear how the therapeutic work in a group of young children cannot leave aside playing all together, which includes the involvement of the therapist him/herself at a body level. The bodily engagement becomes the first home that is able to welcome the dragon – that is, the hot emotions. To give a home to the dragon is the same as to provide Read more

The body creates the head: sensations inventions and affective transformations in gruoups of children

9 July 2012/in Adriana Dondona, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

The body with its resources of sensoriality, expressions and gestures is at the centre of the scene in children’s groups, the heart of the action, imagination, invention and exchange. An individual and collective process of ongoing creation and redefinition of relations between the body, the mind and the external world is initiated around this stimulus and common catalyst. For psyche to really become creative without being limited to reality, the child needs to experiment through his body the mesh between sensory and imagination, shape and symbol, playing imaginary roles allowing him to embed the quality of objects, turning them into his own, reinventing his inside world. Through Read more

Adolescent mind and neurosciences

9 July 2012/in Gianluigi Monniello, Lauro Quadrana, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

Adolescent Mind Transformation and Neurosciences. We have lately been observing a great development both in neurophysiologic and in neuropsychological research aiming to explain and integrate, on behalf of some scientists, how scientific breakthroughs may be of utility in confirming the basics of the psychoanalytic theory. Neurosciences have lately been defining the structure and functions of the brain systems processing the information about the relationship with the caregiver and underlying the subjectuality and intersubjectivity mechanisms. Thanks to brain imaging we can nowadays observe the progressive maturation of the brain in adolescence, especially the complete development of the frontal lobe which, from the Read more

Body and images of the body in a group of adolescents in an educational context

9 July 2012/in Melania Ametrano, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

The author aims to demonstrate how adolescent corporeity manifests itself within group discussion in school contexts. To be precise, the groups were formed of female members only and presented intense relationships between equals and the peculiarity of the evolutional phase of the those taking part in the group activate complex and articulate transference and counter-transference feelings. The emphasis is placed precisely on the transformative potential in the adolescent body and psyche, amplified by the group setting that , at the same time, facilitates, the passage from a place Read more

The body in the group: its presence and absence

9 July 2012/in Chiara Cemolin, Maurizio Salis, Michela Gatta, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group, Silvia Riccamboni, Silvia Romano/by @dmin

Abstract

Working with adolescents, and specifically with those affected by an eating disorder, makes many apparent contradictions come out. In this paper we focalized on the body which, in apparent contradiction, can hinder and become an obstacle to the expression of the real self, while continuing literally to provide the measure of the self at one and the same time. The body is seen by anorexics as a target, to be suffocated in its demands and fundamental needs, reduced to the bone and strictly disciplined. But suffocating the body means deadening the emotions expressed by the body too. It is in response to a fundamental anorexic assumption, consisting in a return to a deadly nothingness, that the group therapy approach makes sense. The group can provide a space and time where the vacuum becomes visible and can be contacted by the group as a whole. In an effort to reflect on this paradoxical situation, so central to anorexia but almost physiological in adolescence, which makes it Read more

The lounge of restless. The experience of UNITRE in Vico Equense (Naples)

9 July 2012/in Germana Aiello, Maddalena Cinque, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

A psychotherapist has been leading an open group for seven years. It lasts one hour monthly and it is composed of elderly men and women. This initiative is part of UNITRE local programme: a cultural association placed in a lot of Italian towns. It starts its work as a discussion group about preordained subjects or themes, but recently it has become an interactive group based on communication and interaction among the members of the group. These features with the number of components of the group (15-30 units) and the involvement in the time and in the space have allowed to shape a setting of the median group. The communication requirement marks out this group: it is difficult for elderly people to communicate, because they are often considered, together disabled people and children, the weak class. The themes, expressed in terms of opposition, youth/old age, health/illness, life/death, were discussed by the group giving them new meanings, thanks to the group’s work based on communication and koinonia. In this way people have managed to overcome the sense of isolation and to exorcise t Read more

Experience made concrete: the body-mind relationship and possible transformational processes in Group Therapy

9 July 2012/in Nadia Fina, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

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 Read more

Corporeity in psychotic communication: an institutional experience of group phsycoanalitical therapy

9 July 2012/in Orietta Occhiuzzi, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

This work is a clinic contribution on corporeity in a psychotic communication into an institutional experience of psychoanalitic group of psychotherapy in a Residential therapeutic Community of a mental health department. Ethimologically “to communicate” means create a relationship, to get on well. So the body into a group structures a hard power of communication, it is a place and a centre of conflict of psycopathology in which emotions lie-unthinkable emotions inscribed in sense datum. The gamma function into the group let to receive the psychotic communication and Read more

“Is there the group?” About “complex” patients in the analytical experience

9 July 2012/in Giuseppina Marruzzo, Pasquale D’Acunzo, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

The excessive rigidity of fondness (narcissism) and the absence of a thought ‘as if’ (capacity of symbolization) in psychotic patients, make it difficult for the analyst to build a therapeutic alliance and a relationship of transfert. In the early stages of the group, the sensoriality and the corporality, present in the field of group, might play a significant role in the starting of the therapeutic process. In fact, if the analyst in the groupor through the group, approaches the psychotic suffering, considering the dimensions of corporality and the sensoriality shown by the patients not as obstacles, but as availability referred to the particular moment (here and now), he has the opportunity of an access to a level of preverbal and proximate communication, unconscious and primitive, which is the only Read more

Empathy and intersubjectivity in group psychotherapy. Pain sharing and mirror neurons.

9 July 2012/in Goriano Rugi, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

The author’s main hypothesis is that intersubjectivity is at the base of the establishment and preservation of the small therapy group, which is also the place where intersubjectivity disorders can appear and be properly dealt with. What is favoured, is a prelogical and automatic conception of intersubjectivity, in continuation with the theory of mirror neurons, that well describes the pain sharing phenomena in small groups. The author thus tries to evaluate the congruency of present neurophysiological models with the Bionian field theory. Instead of conceiving the group as a whole, the antinomy group/individual is overcome by suggesting a multidimensional synchronous space vision, inspired by Matte Blanco’s model. After a close review of the main conception of intersubjectivity – Stern, Psychology of Self, Kaës – the author attempts to trace back the rationales of empathetic perception and intersubjectivity to the mould of the present phenomenical turning point of psychoanalysis. Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic-empathetic Read more

Body-playing: sensory and bodily experience with training groups

9 July 2012/in Anna Bruno, Marina Gallozzi, Sensoriality corporeity and sexuality in the group/by @dmin

Abstract

In this article we’ll explore the sensory and body dimension in group process activated in training. With this contribution, we offer our reflections born within psycho- bodily sessions that we conducted as part of a wider educational project, divided into several groupal stages. In particular, our attention has been activated by the observation of how, in group setting, communication occurs not only through speech and listening, but also through the perception of non-verbal elements that can occur in a powerful way: sight and sense of smell, for example, may be preferred to hearing. As it happens through dreams, imagination and verbal communication, the unconscious expresses itself also through the body, through signs, movements, posture, tone, etc. .. In our experience, we meet body, through an analytic listening., this because we don’t consider body neither as a means of cathartic expression or as a producer of signals but as a potential creator of Read more