Reflections on a Story: Group, on the Processes of Change and Identificatory Reorganization
Abstract
The authors present a story that does not represent the analytic situation, but a testimony that needed the presence of other, with capacity for reverie, able to contain a space of meanings to enable the processing and reprocessing of phenomena of the lived experience, interwoven in a symbolic plot.
The story is about the history and emotional experience lived by a 19 year old young man during the historical moment related to the economic, politic and social collapse due to the Nazi invasion in Poland.
The reflection is about the psychic change and the processes of identificatory rearrangements implied in it.
We emphasize that this story cannot be understood from the intrapsychic, with its structures and functions, alone. We think that each subject has a place in a group and in the family structure from his origin; and this group has a place in his mind, not only in what arises from the oedipal identifications and the organization of the Superego-Ego-ideal system, but also from the social representations that build the social historic subjectivity. What is incorporated psychically are not merely instances but linking structures, in a group conception of the mind about a subject imbedded socially, in an interplay of mutual determinations between the individual and the collective.
