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EscherIstituzioni

The necessary institution

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Abstract

The institution which works well is the institution we become aware of only when it fails, like the air we breathe, so necessary but so little present to our conscience. Some psychoanalysts, in particular Bleger and Kaës, have theorized about this condition which is necessary for the psychic life of the individual in groups and of groups themselves. Both theorizations entail a further narcissistic injury, the fourth one, after the ones inflicted by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, to a concept of the human subject as master of the universe.  The ego becomes such in the group and from the group. The institution is a necessary vital organization: the first one is the body itself in its synergetic and silent functioning that, when everything goes well, allows the subject to sleep with the freedom of dreaming. Other institutions are the developmental environment in which the child can grow up, and the social organization where he/she can have the freedom to play, love, work, and think.
Which institution? Certainly not an institution that demands to discipline our dreams and behaviour, but an institution that allows us to live as one and many, as a singular plural. It is not utopia, but a need that nevertheless requires working through a narcissistic injury in order not to transform the institution into a disciplinary apparatus  that pushes the narcissism of one subject to annihilate the narcissism of the other, even though it appears with new features that are only apparently plural. 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

PsichiatriaGruppo

The Dream of Prometheus

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Abstract

The hypothesis that prompted the following article arose from aconsideration of dreams as important supports for analytical transformation. Beginning with Bionian concepts, the author demonstrates, using as a clinical example a group of patients with severe mental health disorders being treated in Read more

PsichiatriaGruppo

Border areas: the experience of a group of women migrants. From invisibility to the birth of a dream space

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Abstract

This paper aims to tell about group psychotherapy at the Opera San Francesco per i Poveri Clinic. This device is made up of migrant women from different countries, of different ages and who present different clinical conditions, who share one or more traumatic events. Over the years, the group developed the ability to think and subsequently to dream.  It Read more

BionPaint

Bion’s concept of time

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Abstract

The use of particular mental time by Bion allows to arrive to being in “0”, the psychic reality, which is the most possible “to – sensory”. Let us examine the proposed Bion of a “scientific psychoanalysis”, where the scientific is the “act of faith”, that is a disciplined denial of memory and desire, both composed of elements based on impressions of the senses, is reached via a stop in the present, which allows you to start the session with the mind as much as possible like a tabula rasa, that is not entirely feasible, Bion because there is always a huge history between Read more

GiorgioneFilosofi

The Dream Narrative as an Interpersonal Event – Research Results

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Abstract

The author presents a specific type of narration: the dreamtelling as a request for containment and elaboration of specific mental contents. It is underlined how the possibility of communicating and sharing his/her own dreams represents a function learned in the course of the earliest exchanges between parents and children. The results of a research are illustrated – its purpose is to investigate the correlation between either the development or the inhibition of this function, on the part of parents and the gender Read more

sogno e gruppo

“Istitution’s dream” in the groups of supervision

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Abstract

We would like to take advantage of this meeting on dreams and the group to propose reflections relating to a particular working context with which we have been dealing in the last few years. We are referring to the supervisions carried out as external consultants in the mental health structures with groups of operators of the services. In fact “group supervision” has become a stable practice in many psychiatric services, starting off from the pilot experiments carried out by some of us in the early 1980s. Previous meetings of occasional consultation had occurred in certain groups, however in our opinion without taking their place in the working set-up and Read more

sogno e gruppo

The advent of a dream in a group of children

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Abstract

This paper follows the perspective suggested by Francesco Corrao in his writings on groups (F. Corrao, 1998), taking up some of the elements present in clinical practice that help to describe the question of dreams in a small early-childhood analytical group. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first I treat the emergence of metaphor within the group; in the second, the advent of dream through a metaphorical bridge; in the third, the series of dreams with speech and Read more

sogno e gruppo

Transformational potentials of the peer group

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Abstract

In this paper I would like to examine the transformational potentials that characterise the peer group, in groups of adolescents Read more

PieroSogno

Supervision of institutional groups: myths and dreams

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Abstract

Just as the vertice of the dreamer is not the same as the one the dreamer finds himself in when he wakes up, and the vertice of the artist is not that of the interpreter of the work of art, in the same way the vertice of associations is not the same as the vertice of the psychoanalyst carrying out interpretations and the vertice of the creator of the myth is not the same as the one of the person who attempts to reformulate it, contributing to the transformations that occur in the course of institutional supervision. Viewed in this light, institutional myths become elements for the understanding of the basic functioning of the service. And if a non-rigid myth presents itself in the course of supervision, this helps professionals and the group to treat their patients. However, the discovery of a rigid myth can also sometimes give the supervisor an opportunity to make it interpretable, thereby offering it up to the understanding of the group, in an attempt to unblock it Read more

PieroSogno

One dream for two people: dreaming in the psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy

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Abstract

In this paper are presented the role and functions of dreams analyzed within the couple. Elements of applied clinical triggers a reflection towards the possibility of the dream on and helping to foster the communication process within Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Presentation of clinical material about a therapeutic group of teenagers

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Abstract

The author presents a group of duration of one year, which is constituted by six members aged between 16 and 22 minutes. The sessions are weekly duration of an hour and thirty minutes. In the first session the therapist has been an active dreamer with his eyes open for the entire group. Through the image of the “History endless” returned to the members of their existential position of “waiting for the dust grains destructiveness of anything,” however, able to bring to life “the world of Fantasy.” Making possible an imaginative capacity even on content so deadly has mobilized members in the hope of salvation, enabling them to project themselves in a constructive future. In the next session in fact, the boys lead the group through dreams-nightmares, anxieties related to their representation of self. The character Zero represents the part of self-restraint miserable and therefore feared. Its representation in ridiculous allowed them to tolerate, accept and make be faced by themselves. In this way the children were able to produce a dramatic shift from existential emptiness (Zero), forced to imagine a magical and omnipotent force (God), which alone can deal with it, hope to be able to use at least “that one grain of dust, “as a Read more

PieroSogno

The sheaves. A dream recounted in Group. (From “The Young Joseph” by Thomas Mann. From “Genesis”, Chapter 37, Verses 1-32)

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Abstract

The biblical story of Joseph, intertwined with “the young Joseph” by Thomas Mann and analytical affairs of a patient illustrating the vicissitudes of narcissistic object links within the pervasive and influenced, of Read more

Dream interpretation; from traditional cultures to group psychotherapy

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Abstract

It’ s not surprising that both in western societies and traditional societies, dream interpretation is contextualized socially and culturally. Dream is a human experience, that is filtered through the lenses of our language, our social values, and cultural symbolism. By focusing on how dreams have been used in traditional cultures: the creative potential of dreams, the role of guide and omen, the knowledge that is gained through dreams, the passage to other dimensions and worlds; all these functions that have been analysed by many anthropologists and they allow us to look at dreams from another point of view. A dream that is told in group therapy, can underline the need and the willingness of the group to face the shared unconscious and to develop a connection with the unthinkable. There is a difference between dreaming, that can be considered as intra-psychic event and narrating a dream which by definition is an interpersonal event. In 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

PieroSogno

Two dreams by Piero della Francesca

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Abstract

The author studies the contribution that emerges from Piero’s dream vision. He notes the relationship doctor/patient is replaced by the painter/viewer one: the dream isn’t the problem but the solution, it isn’t a puzzle that needs to be reconstructed piece by piece, but rather a global narration governed by the painter/viewer’s eye, controlled by the laws of Read more

Comments to the interview with Balbino

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Abstract

The interest that such an interview brings about is in comparing an interpretative system of dream that is different to the model proposed by psychoanalysis and that was initially elaborated around the clinical individual cure. The interview poses questions that we must solve using other analytical systems, such as that of group analysis or family therapy: Who dreams in the dream? How can telepathic dreams be understood, the shared and mutual dreamlike space? The practice of shaman dreams, the different traditional therapeutic practices used via the means of dream, the dreamlike journeys of the Pumé of the Andes, all these issues that have been highlighted and analysed by numerous anthropologists Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Experiental group and dream

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Abstract

The experiential group has a duration defined, a beginning and an end, known by the participants. A purpose, not therapeutic, but explicitly and programmatically “experiential”. A conductor having acquired expertise on the events – the “effects” – the unconscious, is able to perceive what is happening in the group and not only to provide “interpretations”, but also to support and facilitate the processes of communication and thought, suggesting images that promote the ability to self-representation of the group. The experiential group is then placed in an institutional framework that traces the boundaries in space and time and determines its goals: knowledge through the experience of how the mind moves in a group that has set itself the task of observing what that happens inside. Implicit in this approach, as the authors try to clarify later, the idea that the ‘”experience” is a social construct and the outcome of a process of working that involves elements of intersubjectivity and communication. Little by little, the dreams begin to appear in communications that take place during Read more

PieroSogno

Group and women’s dreams

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Abstract

The paper I present to you refers in a certain way to a traditional work: the process of finding and giving sense to some recurrent dreams in long-term psychoanalytically oriented therapeutic women’s groups. But I propose to you, though not being in the specific setting, to “treat“ now these dreams in the mental attitude suggested by Gordon Lawrence in his “Social Dreaming”, almost “dreaming them again”, giving space to the echo, to our associations. As they come from the shared experience of our cultural context where our fears and desires as males and females take shape. Moreover, though relating to a “traditional” work of giving sense to dreams, the process through which the sense came to light was due to a long staying in the “negative capacity”, to the “attentive passivity” David Armstrong underlines in his contribution to “Social Dreaming”. The “attentive passivity” is always necessary in our therapeuts’ life but it has Read more

ComeSpecchio

Bus as therapy group setting metaphor: Lista de Espera, a journey inside the group

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Abstract

Bus as therapy group setting metaphor: Lista de Espera, a journey inside the group. Abstract-This work aims to analyze the film “Lista de espera”, from the perspective of group dynamics working among the passengers of a bus station. The interest is placed on the foundation of the group and the conflict that is generated over time between participants; going through the basic assumptions we can see how it comes to teamwork in the performing stage. The film is a metaphor for what happens in a group psychotherapy, where differences become Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Psycho-Dynamism of dramisation in groups

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Abstract

The author relates the dream to a production typical of the group, the dramatic representation and tries to show the similarities and differences between the two. The author takes into consideration the thought of Anzieu (1963), who pointed out the equivalence between the small group and the dream. A group would be, in a sense, a dream dreamed by various dreamy. If we give the dream a function beyond that of satisfaction of desires processing, its reflection can get even closer comparison of the dream with the actions of a small group of psychoanalysts. The author suggests that dreams, in a group, have one of the main functions in this formalization: its function is to provide models of work and thought the group, as well as matrices for identifying its components. Spaces in which to adapt, or with whom you can establish oppositions. The dreams performing among other functions, to mediate between the production of an individual and the group. Allow it to develop models of reflection and action that can go from one form to the next myth, relatively polysemous Read more

PieroSogno

Dreaming and Thinking in the Group

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Abstract

If we consider the group and the individual as different points of a continuum, the commonly accepted ontological dichotomy between the individual and the group will become obsolete, from the moment that specifically human individuality will be seen in relational terms, resulting in an encounter not only between different individuals but also an encounter between different forms of groups. When group therapeutic work starts, intrapsychic aspects become communicable through the interactions that transform the unconscious and archaic aspects of communication into socially shared experiences; thus, the experience and the story of the group become individually and internally represented, in a sharing of reciprocal transformation. My principal references in psychoanalysis are the theories on object relations that have largely contributed to psychoanalytical studies thanks to the relational paradigm. This paradigm emphasizes above all the Read more

ComeSpecchio

Group, psychoanalysis and cinema. Notes about a formative group and cinema experience

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Abstract

In this essay we are willing to bring out some remarks on the usage of movies within experiential groups. As it is already widely acknowledged, there exists a strong relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis, especially between Freud’s theory of dreams and the cinematographic language. It is indeed interesting to highlight that they both are born close to each other: the first projection of Lumière brothers’ La sortie de l’usine Lumière in 1895, and the publication of Freud’s The interpretation of dreams, in 1899. The connection between cinema and psychoanalysis can be analyzed under different perspectives: the way psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts are represented in movies (Gabbard, 1999), the psychoanalytic elements nested into movies and their narratives, the effects of movies on the spectator (Musatti, 1961, Elsaeser e Hagener, 2007 et al.), or, the usage of psychoanalysis in semiotic studies of the diegetic device (Metz, 1977). A further perspective is proposed in our work, that is the effect of a movie on a group of spectators, emphasizing the relationship between what is represented in the movie and the mental reality of group members who watched the movie altogether.  The rest of the essay is structured as follow: the next section preliminary introduces the meanings that a movie might have in a psychoanalytic model; the second section will focus on cinema and dreams; the third section, after a brief introduction on the relationship between cinema and group, describes the Read more

PieroSogno

The Myth of the Self Made Man realistic and function of dreams in patients with eating disorders

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Abstract

In this paper we analyze the case of a patient who comes in for consultation conducted of binge eating. We intend this as an eating disorder that shows early alterations in the psychic structure, caused by the dynamics of dependence of the patient towards the mother who adopted as a way of disinvestment affective behavior. The patient seems to be a myth, which is that of “Self Made Man”. In this she finds herself. So are depicted in relation to the divestment mother. This identification with the myth has generated an emphasis on the cognitive component at the expense of the body and, consequently, has developed a hierarchization for the cognitive. In the paper we analyze a Dream and also its latent sentence. This, is not a way to realize desires but is a realistic thinking, and appears as a reality that was Read more

PieroSogno

Dream or Myth? The two forms and the two fates of the imaginary

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Abstract

The author distinguishes between two imaginary group. The first is an imaginary explorer, organized by the primary processes of representation of the unconscious: the dream. The second is an imaginary explanation, featuring a ghostly background and whose goal is to create a self-representation of common and shared by the group: the myth. Dream and myth work at their own level through the same material of unconscious processes. The myth acts through tertiary processes, which create the connection between the primary and the secondary, while the dream is governed by primary processes. The following are then developed: describe the function mythopoeic into groups (Kaes R., 1976). The myth occurs after a disaster such as the representation of repair of group identity. The creation and expression of the myth of thought generate content from a source of anguish and of non-thought. They therefore worth re-establishment of the origin, the order of the world and its purpose. The myth acts as a “replacement” of ‘dreaming. It is designed as a meta-interpretation of the dream. The myth acts as a significant predisposition used by the preconscious. E ‘in this light that we can better discern the difference between the Read more

PieroSogno

The Group, The Body and Dreaming with Eyes Wide Open

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Abstract

The author describes a narration/dream narrated by a patient in a group of adolescents, with which she wants to comunicate to all the members of the group her changements. The author shows the group can stimulate a real process of transformations, properly in the body, if it is conduced in an active way and he describes a particular method G.R.F., that he uses with Read more

PieroSogno

Presentation, Mith, Dream and Group

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In May, 1999 the first issue of Funzione Gamma went on-line. The theme was Dream and Group. Not long after, a second issue on that same theme came out. Three years have gone by and the ninth and current issue focuses on the theme which is Dream, Myth and Group, once again. In a few days time, there will be a further issue which deals with this theme. The scientific committee and the editorial staff believe that this theme is of fundamental importance not only for those who work in the group therapy field, but also for those who come from other disciplines which deal with the relationship between individual and group. A large number of dreams Read more

PieroSogno

Social Dreaming: a paradox accepted (a psychoanalyst’s condensed thoughts on Social Dreaming)

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Abstract

The text addresses the Social Dreaming of Lawrence and its functions, offering a reflection on the potential of this instrument in contributing to the increase in shared creativity, to achieve a democratic balance between the parties in the act of dreaming, investigating and evaluating aspects more subjective and personal related to the very act of dreaming and can do it Read more

PieroSogno

Notes on Space – time memory throught the dream

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Abstract

Dreams represent the activity of the unconscious mind that can transform and digest unbearable emotional states of mind into a “theatre of mind”. In this theatre, dreams play to the audience of the dreamer, want to be listened to and understood. Ella Freeman Sharpe, the English psychoanalyst, wrote that “the only dreamless state is death”. In group analysis, we recognise that the internal and external are always in flux, so in dreams we need to pay attention both to the social context in which the dream has occurred, and recognise Read more

PieroSogno

The Problem Solving Function of Dreams in Children’s Groups

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Abstract

In this paper I will be referring to two dreams. The first dream was told by a little girl aged ten and a half, in a group that has been going for three years now, and is held in my rooms. The second was dreamt by a girl aged nine and a half who is a member of the same group. She told it to her mother who referred it to me. I am describing these dreams for a particular reason. Above all I wish to emphasize the centrality that I believe the problem solving function (and the narration that results from it) has in the dreaming Read more