Abstract
The work starts from an experience of conducting a homogeneous group with eating disorders with the variant of the insertion of a male subject in a group of women.
The therapeutic factors of group dynamics and emotional growth of patients and therapists were Read more
In this issue we present four papers in which the authors refer different group experiences and group therapies with ID persons. Three of the papers are written by therapists of the Units of Psychiatry of Mental Development in Geneva (UPDM – Unité de Psychiatrie du Développement Mental) A paper of general purpose, describes the care tools and the group techniques in the domain of UPDM. One other article relates the discussion and information group about psychotropic medication. A third paper describes a discussion and exchange group, on an informal appearance, having the aim to close the week and prepare D persons to a fearless week-end. A forth paper is prepared by NN and describes an experience in a educational group working on the ID persons evolution toward autonomy. Read more
The aim that we have set ourselves in this issue is to bring forward the different characteristics that exist in the relation between children and adults, and adolescents and adults in therapeutic groups. The first article by Marco Bernabei deals with the different positions of the adult, and the relation with him, in the two types of groups, showing how in children’s groups a co-construction of a third adult object takes place by the members and the therapist. Pierre Privat focuses attention on the first siction of a group of children and their relation with the adult. Dominique Quelin poses the question on what place the adult therapist hold in a world of adolescents and their parents. Also Velia Bianchi Ranci sees the therapist adult searching for a place in groups with children. Angela Baldassare in groups with adolescents retains that the adult was invested with parental functions, revealing inadequateness. Cesare Freddi develops the theme of Read more
Abstract
The relationship between adult and children or adolescents in therapeutic groups is the central theme of this paper which highlights the different modes of perception of the adult therapist by children or adolescents in the group. Several considerations about it are inspired by personal experience of participants in relation to children aged between 7 and 10 years and participating adolescents aged between 14 and 16 years. In particular, attention focuses on the role attributed to the adult therapist and the perception of the latter where there is a parental relationship to the central reference and where it has instead been moved to the background in a more Read more
Abstract
Seven children are sitting around the table in silence, there are four boys and three girls aged between nine and ten years old. Every now and then they give each other a stealthy glance and carefully observe the small room in which we are sitting. There is no furniture to catch the eye, except a large blackboard, that stands out against the white walls…. They’ve been sitting like this for ten minutes with a decisively expectant air. This is their first session of group psychotherapy, I tell them that we are going to share a common experience and all together we will try to understand what is going on between us. In order for this to happen I go on, they can say anything that comes into their minds. They continue to sit silently, motionless, only their legs are moving restlessly under the table. Every time I start a new group I am always a little anxious and I ask myself as they probably do too, what’s going to happen ? I have already met them several times, alone or with their parents, so I am already familiar with their problems: inhibition, sleeping difficulties, enuresis, and attention disorders are just Read more
Abstract
The ways of relating within the group varies according to different factors such as age, culture, pathology. Several participants represent different groups and in particular what happens in adult groups compared with groups of children or adolescents. The same preparation, the group is evident and characterized in different ways depending on their age, needs and possibilities Read more
Abstract
The therapist’s function in a group of adolescents can’t be kept out of consideration from one’s own mental disposition, experience, cultural references and from one’s own adolescence. The teen-agers themselves are able to recognize the leader’s psychological profile and to challenge the adult-therapist attacking his or her vul-nerability. Before discussing the subject, it is important for me to specify that I work as a therapist in a public psychiatric structure in Rome. In this context, I hold positions in the institution as an administrator and as a therapist. The patients expect many things from me: they would like a comfortable room, with nice furniture, while at the same time maintaining total availability. Often patients who use public services are guided by some fantasies: the ambulatory is seen like a big good mother that can offer many things, not particulary punitve and that is ready to receive everybody,a structure that functions like a large-meshed net. The operators are often trusted to by the fantasy to be omnipotent and to be very good in their work because they have many years of experience and because they have seen many patients. All this, unavoidably, brings the risk of running into frequent disappointments, devaluations or idealization of the therapist. In this congress it is important for me to investigate which functios are brought up by the group of Read more
Abstract
For its members the family is a mixture of both health and illness and children are the carriers of this either at a manifest or at a latent level. In this paper we are going to resume one of the developments we had in the psychotherapeutic Gin-Gap method’s theory and technique. Method in which the children’s and the parents’ therapeutic and groupal work took place in parallel. We are going to report about our participation as staff experts and supervisors in a Clinic that takes care of the community which depends from the Autonomous University De Quertaro that is in the suburbs. Our work mainly used the Gin-Gap method with community’s children and Read more
Abstract
The paper discusses the specific elements of clinical work with children in groups: some of these elements are meeting with the chaos, with the primitive emotions and the bodily involvement. Go through and deal with the analytical model these elements is the genesis of any possibility of designing a game that can be shared in the group game. The presence of the adult and his role as the guide, when you work inside the game requires the ability to regress and to immerse themselves in no way to begin to translate thoughts into the language of bodies in motion, noise and excitement, which draw just the beginning narrative fragments. When the conductor resist stopping in K -, can then re-emerge with a building sense that it allows the structuring of a story that the group shares. This path analytic model applied to Read more
Abstract
The psychology of groups and certain structural dynamic elements of their functioning are common to all groups. However, there are some variables that change according to the emotional needs and developmental tasks connected to the age of the individuals that comprise such groups. The basic feature that clearly distinguishes therapeutic groups for adults from groups comprising children or adolescents is asymmetric union, that is, the concomitant presence of an adult or adolescents. An adolescent views the leader of a group as an adult before he perceives him as a therapist, and this immediately gives a specific connotation to their relationship. In all adolescent therapeutic groups, sooner or later the therapist is asked about his age, his physical decline or his aging. The adult in a group of adolescents is the physical witness of time, of the age difference and thus of the difference between generations: this conjures up the thought of aging and makes death present. Indeed, to have access to an adult identity, the adolescent must accept changes in his body and sexuality. He Read more
Abstract
This article describes the role of the therapist within groups of children, highlighting the natural tendency of recent research and aggregation of peer relationships. The creative potential that arises from this type of relationship proves a useful tool for growth and acquisition of skills management and troubleshooting tasks and in particular the peer group reveals an important relationship context and can stimulate the creative aspects and development, to a greater extent than in relationships with adults in the family. The therapist in the group will tend to try to take this attitude, reassuring but not proactive, in order to stimulate free expression and respect of children within Read more
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
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
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
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
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
Abstract
The thesis we have followed in this paper intends to highlight the features of the “couple” as one of the privileged places from which to look at the modes the partners use, following frequent unconscious regulation processes, to give rise to a third dimension, a field, their very relation that in its being a shared object at the border between the self and the other represents a third regulation pole that can be acknowledged as their Read more
Abstract
Through clinical experience an effort is made to develop a grid in – knowledge (-K) which was achieved by displacement of column 2 (ψ) to the left of the original. It is asserted that it actively arises as a barrier against the unknown or known and disagreeable. The grid’s heterogeneity is stressed, which becomes more accentuated with the negative dimension. There we face the lower part of the grid (starting from line C) as an inversion of the elements corresponding to the positive grid. However, (–β) elements were created, that are studied by autistic phenomena. Conception of the (–β) elements ruptures or expands Bion’s referential. Transformations into knowledge become important because they will lead the way to transformations in O. A theoretical review became Read more
I have the pleasure of presenting NO 18 of Funzione Gamma: “Disease and the Group”. On the whole, the different contributions in this number have the aim of exploring the notion of disease and pointing out how such a notion acquires a greater complexity, and is enriched conjunctively with further keys to the reading and therapeutic potentialities when the phenomenon disease is seen and treated in a small analytical group. The interest in deepening the notion of disease has absorbed Claudio Neri and his chair (Basis of group dynamics) for many years by setting up connection with experts coming from different disciplines Read more
Abstract
The authors present a dialogue aimed at illuminating the concept of disease, within a complex and multidisciplinary. Following a historical development of the concept, are first identified the elements of the value of Hippocratic medicine, and then articulate the notion with the developments that it has received as part of psychoanalysis and group psychoanalysis. To better understand the concept of disease in the latter area, are also used contributions from the anthropological studies of some cultures that have Read more
Abstract
In this article, the author discusses the concept of pathology in its relational aspects, and the ability to obtain a therapeutic effect by group analysis, which takes into account both intrapsychic experiences, both interpersonal attitudes. The novelty consists in considering the relational disorders according to a broader view, considering the effectiveness of the therapeutic effects are obtained by group analysis that is able to manage the relationship patterns, rather than focusing only on the individual. The Read more
Abstract
The authors of this paper emphasize the importance of group psychotherapy has in recent years in the Mental Health Centers. The individual psychotherapeutic work, was considered more profitable, while contact with the group was considered as a source of disturbance and threat to the individual. In time and ‘happened to the group process enhancement. The Read more
Abstract
In this article, the author explores the dynamics that develop in an analytic setting within an institution, which becomes the container of multiple psychic functions, and in turn interferes with the structural and symbolic dimensions of the setting.
In the institutional context, the different, and the gratuitousness of the setting, make the complex job of processing and Read more
Abstract
This article contains insights and considerations by the author on Balint groups, and especially on the therapeutic relationship between the operator and patient.
In the group, the doctor uses himself as a “drug” and while the speaker speaks of a clinical case experience, relives this story in the hic et nunc .
The group leader and therefore observe the countertransference of the speakerand therefore the group Read more
Abstract
The disease event, in this article, is examined both from an individual perspective, and socially. Thus, in Western society, the parameters of individual psychology are rethought in group psychotherapy, in a manner such as to create conditions to facilitate the sharing of suffering and disease.In different contexts, rituals, suffering, disease, and the states of crisis, are addressed in complex rituals of social sharing of the disease. Therefore, there is a connection point between traditional therapies in the contexts of native Read more
Abstract
The article describes the author’s experience with cancer patients. The therapeutic institution as well as offering space and hospitality, from ‘the opportunity to rethink your situation not only in organic terms, but also psychological. In the paths of these groups shows a thought linked to the disease, linked to the vicissitudes of life, where the disease becomes an opportunity Read more
Sigmund Freud, in “Totem and Taboo” (1912-13) and in “ Psychology of the masses and Ego analysis” (1921) provided us with ideas in order to approach the complex theme of relationships between narcissism and group. It is known as Freud made use of Darwin’s hypothesis about the origins of human society, so he described a primeval horde, dominated by a strong male, put together by libidinal relationships (1912). Focusing on the identification processes which happen between horde members and the idealized leader, Freud affirmed that the process of identification since the beginning had been intrinsically ambivalent and could not even cause any metaphoric version and a cannibal incorporation and distribution of the loved object. Such a dominating person could be “absolutely narcissistic” and “self sufficient”. This figure might have the nature of the leader who, doesn’t love the members of the mass, while these last ones have often the illusion about being loved from their primeval father and sob they are submitted to his authority. Freud (1921) affirmed – quoting ironically Read more
Abstract
The author points out that psychoanalytic work in group discussions and requires special skills. Starting from the Freudian metapsychology and examining the theories of Bleger, he examines in particular the model of the double limit of Green, developed by Freud’s first topography, distinguishes between inside and outside, between the conscious and unconscious. Read more
Abstract
In this article, the author relying on the experience of group psychotherapy and group training, tries to go beyond the understanding of the two Freudian concepts of primary narcissism.
The group situation introduces a formal regression, where the imagination takes her hand, because it causes a transference as the one operating in the dream, which changes the relationship between primary narcissism and secondary narcissism, since it changes Read more
Abstract
The author describes the phenomena related to the proliferation of new ideas and theories in psychoanalysis. Conservation and innovation, loyalty ‘and rupture have characterized the development of psychoanalysis from Freud to the new currents of thought, after the Second World War. From Freud’s concept of archeology of the mind to thoughts and theories more in keeping with social changes. The atmosphere ‘of enthusiasm and self-idealization, but also of disenchantment and naivete, understood Read more