Preface

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With the ‘historical’ edition on groups and group psychoanalysis, edited by the research association on homogeneous groups, ARGO, we would like to prospect the recapitulation of the many faces that the theme presents and its different levels – in order to be able to link the notion of the present, social and individual, to that of the past that has contributed to producing it. The hope is to succeed in presenting the reader with an evolutionary and future-oriented temporal dimension, as a product of attention to the present. This is not a play on terms, but the feeling that linking individual time to social time can help identity harmony in such an important transitional period as the present.
Moreover, Argo has its roots in the experience of the research group linked to the journal Funzione Gamma and the professorial activities of Prof Claudio Neri at La Sapienza in Rome. There, the first questions about ‘homogeneous function’ in the group and the first distinctions between homogeneous states of mind and distinct, differentiated states were born.
With sincere enthusiasm, Argo’s journal: Group Homogeneity and Differences is publishing jointly with Funzione Gamma, which is hosting it simultaneously, its eighth edition (coming soon, on www.argo-onlus.it/la-rivista), to honour a creative filial bond, and to valorise the polycultural and polysemantic experience of the working group.

Presentation

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Usually the annual editions of Argo’s journal Group: Homogeneity and Differences and the quarterly editions of the journal Funzione Gamma of the Sapienza University of Rome, which on the occasion of this ‘historical’ edition have collaborated on a common issue, publish research on general and current group issues and problems. The main inspiration of the editions is, in short, to strengthen the group bond by sharing the thought that represents it and to keep research alive. In this issue, which has been demanding and is voluminous, it is rather History that imposes its framework and gives a perspective to the elaboration. The word itself, History, is imposing. The great Greek historian Thucydides called it Read more

Acknowledgements

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With the Argo Association, the editorial staff of Group: Homogeneities and Differences, we would particularly like to thank Giancarlo Di Luzio for the initial inspiration on the historical theme of the edition and the dialogue/interview method with the Authors. We would like to thank Honorary Members Claudio Neri and Bob Hinshelwood for their constant presence and contributions, and all members for their commitment, particularly Adelina Detcheva, for her competent willingness to support the work of this eighth historical issue. Heartfelt thanks go to all the Authors, who have shown extraordinary generosity. To the editorial staff of Funzione Gamma, for their hospitality and creative collaboration, to editor Riccardo Williams and Web Master Walter Iacobelli for the order and sense given to the editorial work, to Claudio Neri for his constant inspiration and support. We would like to thank the many readers who provide continuity and vitality to these two journals interested in research on the group, on bonding, on the social and relational processes of the mind, on the resources of the body and mind, individual, inter-individual and social, and on their transitions.

 

Stefania Marinelli and Silvia Corbella

The history of group psychoanalysis in France and the methodological problem of the ‘setting’

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Interview with Denis Mellier
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MusicaGruppo

Kairos, Psychic creativity Musical creativity

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Introduction to dialogue

Having unexpectedly to edit a new issue of Funzione Gamma, inherent in music and in music by correlating with the psychoanalytic point of view, I was found myself, not being an expert in the field, to make use of various memories and some predilections, such as the one for Mozart’s works.
In the recent conference “In Music, between Adolescence and Psychoanalysis”, organized by the ARPAD Association of which you are President, last October at the Salesian University, dedicated to temporality and music in the era of adolesc Read more

PolifoniaCorpo

Biopsychosocial approach to pain

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Abstract

The Author deals with the issue of subjective pain and correlates it with several factors, investigated by the biopsychosocial model according to various perspectives that interact with each other. Read more

PolifoniaCorpo

Beauty as a sichronous Object: between “Superior Object” (mind) and “Lower Object” (body). Primary aesthetics and sociability

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Abstract

We propose to indicate how the experience of Beauty in multiple circumstances is to be linked to the experience of primary aesthetics and its unco Read more

PolifoniaCorpo

Polyphony of body in psychoanalysis. The body in the psychoanalytic research. New pathologies and psychoanalytic clinic

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Presentation The actual curation of this journal issue began a year after it had been proposed to the editorial staff. For a full year there had been no response from the authors. Coronavirus arrived. And there came a flood of contributions, a widespread enthusiasm was animated: themes, styles, models, original and valuable lexicons multiplied with various thematic perspectives. We did not know what started all of a sudden: sometimes the engine runs, but the starter does not, sometimes the opposite happens. This time they had both had a good start after an empty time. Sometimes the unconscious, either common or single, is located in the most unexpected and difficult to see places, and it reveals itself with a movement of vital emergence. Read more

GruppoRito

Group and Rite

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Abstract

This text attributes several significances and functions to social rite and its construction inside group. Certainly, these have a social value in  maintaining and keep cohesive group, but also they can stimulate new experiences, not already known and coherent.
Author poses three different notions of social rite and he compares them to other three opposed notions. First of all, (a) the containing function and creative of social rite inside group, contrasting to ceremony, which makes rite’s  structure more formalized. Then, (b) notion of rite is viewed as a shared dreaming’s narrative rite. Read more

TraumaGruppo

Presentation of the edition

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At the Conference organized in the spring of last year 2017 by the “Rasztòw Group Analysis Institute” in Warsaw: The desire for homogeneity and conflict (Pragnienie jednorodnosci a konflikt) at the University Library, some vibrant thematic cores were presented and discussed, considerably interesting to the work of the groups, starting from the presentation of

Maciej Zbyszewskion the leading of groups with war veterans, in which conditions emerged of the extraordinary nature of war experiences and the difficulty of transforming the conflicts. In the group, the needs of the subjects, punctually identified, appeared linked to chronic dimensions of estrangement Read more

TraumaGruppo

Therapeutic and analytical group field with anorexic patients

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Abstract

In this contribution there are two main questions related to clinical conceptualizations in the psychoanalytic field which can be adopted in the work with the anorexic patients. 1. The first concerns the question of whether anorexia can be described as an independent psychoneurosis, such as, in Freud’s classification of psychoneurosis, the obsessive syndrome. 2. The second question concerns the possibility of conceiving that when the patients are disturbed at the oral level, or more generally in Read more

EdipoGruppo

Displaced oedipal scene

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Abstract

This article describes The individual case of a patient is described which leads/brings at the beginning of his analysis the predominant theme of a multiple and stratified archaic primary scene, whose constitutive factors appear “displaced”, such as jagged orthopedic fractures, and condensed in a cumulative traumatic time. It  soon become clear that the oedipal scene taken into consideration is shared by the entire family group and, through the activity of the “valences” Read more

MemoriaFuturo

Introduction “A memoir of the future”

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It is owing to Claudio Neri’s inspired intuition that we were able to plan this fascinating issue of Funzionegamma on Bion’s Memoir of the Future (hereafter MoF). Inspired for many reasons. Firstly, as a result of the literature’s curious scarcity of works on the Trilogy; and then, because the paradigm prompted by Bion is becoming increasingly well known among psychoanalysts – and moreover in a version that places Italian authors in the forefront; and finally, because focusing on MoF means Read more

Senso

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

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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

Senso

Notes on the meaning of clothing in the group

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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

Bion

Preface, Truth and evolution in “O” in Bion’s work

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It was not easy to give an order, or even a sequence, to the thematic contributions of so many authors, from a variety of places and cultures (England, Brazil, France, Israel, Italy), approaching Bion’s thinking in an effort to share the idea that psychoanalysis, as a “psychodynamic probe”, can continuously explore that which is happening while it is happening and produce new dimensions of meaning. More than a sequence, whether historical or thematic, we had in mind rather a simultaneous presentation in various dimensions. This is why we decided to open the issue (which is to be followed by a second) with an article focusing on Bion’s idea of the emotional turbulence created by the encounter between two or more Read more

Bion

Homogeneity of the protomind

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Abstract

Considering the homogeneous nature of the group (traumatised war veterans at Northfield hospital) that first led Bion to study the group function and the contribution of the social and primitive mind to cognitive processes and psychic evolution, the contribution first examines the etymological and historic notion of homogeneity, going on to compare it with the main psychoanalytic models that have used it in their theoretical treatment as an element significant to the psychic mechanism; and, finally, this dimension (of indistinction) is observed as a function that contains its own reciprocal (the fluctuating impulse toward individuation) and that will tend to behave in psychoanalysis as a “probe” (Bion, 1970) by Read more

MatisseIcaro

Editorial note, Reflections on the adolescent group with particular reference to trauma and accidents

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The preparation of this issue proposed by Paola Carbone on trauma and accidents during adolescence has had a long period of incubation that created a network of exchanges. First of all it produced an unusual editorial event (what authors treat such a specific and dramatic theme?) Secondly, a network of research (clinicians, theorists, and students exchanged pertinent information and questions), and ultimately creative communication and contacts (the large number of competent, courageous researchers with narrative capabilities in this field created dense and warm exchanges).

The painful theme of this issue paradoxically, had a regenerating effect on the curators, the authors and the editorial staff, so much so that we could even go as far as saying we sowed the seeds of knowledge, bonds and reparative hopes, and above all we were able to see a dimension of experience (the adolescent condition) recognised and individuated, not an occasional or a chronological dimension, but one that is part of the nucleus of subjectivity and the process of ‘subjectivization’: part of that field of shared elements of the group to Read more

BronzinoBionFoulkes

Introduction, Bion and Foulkes

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Introducing the present issue of  Funzione Gamma devoted to”Bion and Foulkes” I would like to thank all the contributors as well as those who took part in preparing it. Going through the several papers I need first of all to emphasize how .meaningful and enriching (in the sense of future developments)the sources of psychoanalytic thinking about the group are, how fascinating it is to inquire about their similarities and differences, how necessary to reread them looking for new integrations and proximities. The topic looks more and more stimulating as we feel the pressures implied by the changes in the rapid development of the social group’s organization and the urgency to compare different epistemological models that permit to work through different approaches to our object.the group. Particularly important the connection to the classical psychoanalytic theory and its development (institutional as well): connection which implies autonomy and distance at the same time, to keep the dialogue with other disciplines alive. If the group’s life and the valuing of the social potentialities of the individual mind are the focus of our attention and research, then the meeting of different minds, on this telematic occasion, represents itself a comunicative space, where group elements come together in a new meaningful and transformative dimension. So the meeting between Bion and Foulkes, historically unsatisfacory, achieves a sort of “mythological Read more

GiorgioneFilosofi

Presentation, Time and Narration

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Time and Narration opens with an introductory essay by Antonino Ferro that reveals the complex semiotic substance of the theme, the range of research it has inspired and the significance of narration in the psychoanalytic framework.

Ferro’s own highly articulated study on the narrative and transformational essence of the here-and-now of the analytic session has contributed to opening up new dimensions for psychoanalytic and transference theories, which take on particular importance in light of the changes being ushered in by modern pathologies and the contexts in which they originate. The book’s various articles examine, above all, the social benefits of narration and its relationship with the (a)temporal element.

The relationship between memory and forgetting is explored through one Read more

GiorgioneFilosofi

The function of time in the narration of Orpheus myth

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Abstract

Through the narration of Orpheus Myth, and the contrast between the time of the underworld and the time of light, the instant of experience and knowledge is described as an exclusive time requiring an absolute presence of the participants and doesn’t allow either the anticipation of the future through desire or the filing of the past by means of Read more

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