Multiplicity of groups, individuality of the person
Abstract
This paper aimed to analyse, through the contributions of authors from different disciplines, how duality, and plurality and internal (and often unconscious) multiplicity seem to be the structural elements of individuality. The individual’s mind seems to be organized around configurations of multiple and discontinuous states of the Self with varying degrees of awareness. The ability to integrate individual multiplicities and discontinuities is based on the fundamental function of the mind to objectify/subjectify itself and others. This function is deficient or non-existent in severe forms of mental distress and this seems to derive, according to the author, from a lack of experience to stably exist as a subject in the mind of another. That is what happens in strict pathogenic interdependencies, where the emergence of an “I” capable of objectifying/integrate a “Me” and the subjectify/recognize the Other is prevented. Through the presentation of a short piece of a session, the author presents some thoughts about how the group Multifamily Psychoanalysis can play a vicarious function in the capacity to objectify/subjectify, through the establishment of a ” Mente Amliada” – by definition plural and multiple – which can provide the experience of think and being thought by another. The possibility of mutual recognition within an external “multitudinous” environment composed of several “I/Subjects” generates a strong discontinuity with respect to what is experienced in the inner world as an invasion of objects or parts of objects, not representable and not thinkable.