Posts

CappelliNarcisismo

Primary narcissism and the group

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Abstract

Beginning with the question : how it turns to become the imaginary “group” unit? the author compares and brings into discussion some postulations derived by the same question in S. Freud, W. Bion, J. Bleger, D. Anzieu, A. Missenard, R. Kaes. She proposes that between narcissistic primary groupality – this means the psychological unit formed by the mother and the baby – and the Ego, object found-created by anaclisis in that other, exists a link in several ways. On one hand, both structures are indistinguishable in the point where they converge and confuse, on the other hand the first one is revealed metaphorically inside the Ego that modulates over it. Finally, narcissistic primary groupality is the negative of the Ego, that what the Ego had to lose-leave to be. From there it is taken that the group is for the Ego what it will never stop to intend recovering and that “make group” or “make one group” is first in the desire of each one, to be a group and to make coincidence borders from the Ego and Read more

CappelliNarcisismo

“The Narcissistic Wound in Diabetes” Reflections on a Group Psychotherapy with a Psychoanalytical Approach with Children Suffering from Diabetes

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Abstract

The objective of this work group, played with children aged between eight and twelve years with diabetes, and ‘was one part to bring patients to the acceptance of the disease, and the other to help them break free attitude overprotective parents. In this sense, the psychoanalytic therapy helps to come out of isolation and to rebuild a balance between mind Read more

MatisseIcaro

Silence in intensive therapy: from an experience of the senses to an experience that makes sense

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Abstract

A short-term homogeneous group of young patients who experienced cranial trauma and recovery in intensive therapy is presented. Once the somatic and sensory experiences triggered off by the trauma and its treatment were mobilized in a group experience, elaboration and transformation of unthinkable elements into emotional, recognisable and narratable elements Read more

MatisseIcaro

Body tattoo and body injured, the vicissitudes of omnipotent control over the body in adolescence

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Abstract

In the paper, tattoos and accidents are seen as two expressions of the omnipotent control that every adolescent feels he can exercise over his own body. The tattooed body expresses a form of control over the body that may even result in colonizing one’s skin. The injured body instead expresses the total loss of control over one’s body. I have tried to focus on some ways in which the attempt is made to exercise omnipotent control in adolescents.
One of the outcomes of the loss of control that the adolescent if exposed to is the fall, understood as the collapse of the grandiose self as intended by Kohut. In this regard, I have highlighted a reaction to the mental trauma, which follows the physical trauma, consisting in the attempt to restore the infantile grandiosity violated by the accident. In order to restore the grandiose self, the adolescent often refuses to deal with the traumatic area and to come to terms with the usually unpleasant reality which the accident exposes the body to. According to the paper, the group with adolescents conducted by an adult therapist makes it possible to approach and work through the trauma, instead of becoming isolated from the traumatic area in an attempt to relive the infantile grandiosity lost. The group with an adult can also help to contain the anxiety produced by the fear of losing the reference group of peers (Carbone, 2009), that is the group that continues to exist after the accident, albeit in different places, in meeting points that may vary and that for some time are surely distant from the fixed places the injured adolescent is forced to frequent. I have considered two different types of accidents, the traditional ones (including accidents during play, of which I provide an example) and non-traditional ones (including accidents induced by risk behaviour, like the ones Read more

ChagalFiaba

Presentation, The Ordering Function of Thought in Folktales

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Each of the articles in the volume relates to unique aspects regarding the affinity existing between fairy tales, or tales which share common characteristics with folktales, and the therapeutic process – either individual therapy, or a group workshop. Several articles in this issue deal with the ways in which fairy tales function in the therapeutic process.
The connecting thread of the articles is the use of the fairy tale as a “mediating object” in psychotherapy, as well as in educational situations: fairy tales convey profound topics, both in therapeutic and educational contexts and provide indirect access to these topics.  Lafforgue, citing Kaës, defines them as a “prêt-porter” for thinking, emphasizing their “ordering function”. Read more

BronzinoBionFoulkes

Reflection on Foulkes and basic assunts, “Italianiter”

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Abstract

The group becomes a place where bygone lacerations are exhibited, and where in the meantime hopefully a remedy will be found. The scars are the concrete evidence of our tormented stories, that show us our limits and those of others, we are aware of the objective difficulties, but we are closer to finding an area where we can express our life project. To remember, and to be remembered by the group ascribes value to the memory, contributing to our being responsible for our present and future. A profound sense of continuity of the Self, makes it possible to face solitude with contentment, time and space become a potential area of creativity. The group constitutes the ideal family, where it is possible to learn to modulate time and the individual-group dialectic. Nucara, Menarini and Pontalti explain: “the family matrix should be a transitional space (or unsaturated family matrix), from which the child (or person) gives meaning to the precedent generations and culture and contemporaneously gives signification to the new, evolutive project that is unknown”. This quotation for me assumes a fundamental model in my conclusion on Foulkes, Bion, the story and the time. Today we can say a group culture is firmly established in the world thanks to the Read more

FormeCircolari

Presentation: Anorexia, Adolescence, Group

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In 2004, Funzione Gamma introduced the 14th edition of “Groups with anorexic patients: therapeutic factors”. Today, we are glad to present the continuation of the dialogue we started back then, to further proceed in our attempt to combine theoretical model and clinical intervention in the 24th edition of “Anorexia, Adolescence, Group”. The title already hints that the theme of identity constitutes the invisible path that will guide us through this edition. As Rouchy (1987) writes, “It is impossible to declare our identity without naming one of the multiple groups to which we belong”. As human beings, we live in groups. Our sense of identity arises and develops from these various affiliations. The group is an essential element of human existence: men are born in groups, they play in groups, they fight in groups and against groups, and all religious and heathen rites are celebrated in groups. In the field of neuroscience, research has shown how the mind develops through relationships. The development of our nervous system is an experience-dependant process: in the early stages of life, significant relationships are the main source of experience, which also modulate genic expression at a brain level. Relationships with others have a great influence on the brain. The circuits that mediate social experience, are closely related to those Read more

Photolanguage© : a method for use with groups in a therapy or training context

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Abstract

The purpose of this special issue is to provide information to the reader about how a Photolanguage© session actually works. Before presenting the setting and its specific features, a few words about the origin of the method and a Read more

Photolangage® and institutional crisis

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Abstract

This paper describes the application of the Photolangage® mediation during a training intervention at a healthcare institution going through a Read more

The function of vacuum in a Photolangage group

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Abstract

This short paper was a small part of an interesting research work during the academic year 98-99 at Lumiere University in Lion, in collaboration with Prof. Claudine Vacheret and Prof.Bernard Duez. My interest in this topic was due to my participation (as trainee) in a group through the Photolanguage method. It took place inside CE.S.A.P (Centre de Soin et d’Accueil Psychothèrapeutique). This centre is a C.A.T.T.P; that is a part time therapeutic reception Centre; its purpose is to promote the rehabilitation of suffered subjects from mental disorders and their reintegration in a social context through their participation in therapeutic groups. It was a group made up of six women (they were five in January only, because Florence left the group) between thirty and fifty years old animated by a psychologist, a psychotic nurse and me. The session took place from October to July, on a Read more

SeuratAdolescenti

From the top to words: conduction and transformation in a therapeutic group of children

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Abstract

In my experience with groups of children (beginning age 4-5 years old, children with an intellective level in the average and with development blocks more or less important: sometimes I also included a child with a psychotic personality structure) I noted that the conductors have different functions, according to the group’s different moments, functions that I will try to illustrate through the history of this group. I would like to specify that these functions, in a developmental spiral model, cross each other and overlap, allowing the group to pass and the integrate itself from a sensorial, motorial, corporeal communication modality of affects to verbal communication modalities, using, as a bridge, the transitionality of playing. On a technical level in the expression they are free (playing, drawing, words, etc.) in a work trim in which the conductor himself can intervene in an active way, if the children ask his participation in playing and in moments in Read more

SeuratAdolescenti

Reality and fiction for the therapeutic couple

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Article already published in the Notebook n. 14 – July-December 2001 of the Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy of Milan edited by the Pisa-Rome International Polygraphic Institutes

Abstract

The necessity to have a precise time and a limited place where the group processes could take place, is a fundamental requirement for the survival of the group. This is to say that a stable setting with clear limited space must to be respected and offered to the group and to the therapeuthic couple’s mind. The group allows some important dynamic movements for the adolescent, allowing the displacement of the infantile unsolved dependence conflicts in regard to their parents on the group of peers. This permits the working-through of the object-relationships in function with the relationships connected with actual experiences and unsolved conflicts Read more

SeuratAdolescenti

The therapist and the group of deviant adolescents

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Abstract

I chose to talk about a sexual crime because I think it’s particularly interesting following the working-through in the group of a crime against a person and not against property, that represents the most diffused kind of adolescent crimes. It is also interesting, for describing the therapist’s position difficulties, that she not only represents an adult in regard to the adolescents, but she also Read more

sogno e gruppo

An Image Mediator in a Dream Mediator within a Group

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Abstract

The image as a mediator in individual therapy and in group sessions provides the occasion to mobilise the primary process of the unconscious, in a movement of regression necessary to any initial visualisation. Starting with this type of visualisation, it is possible to reach an authentic process of symbolisation. By “symbolisation”, I mean the process of connecting primary and secondary processes through “tertiary (intermediary) processes”, as André Green has defined them. Thinking in images favours this liaison through the use of a mediating image which condenses within itself the image of the subject and of the group.  Some images presented in the group exemplify 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

PicassoSaltimbanchi

How do institutions dream

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Abstract

The author part of the box after that Freud made his topical and thanks to their rewriting topological space, he could understand that, beyond the physiological and psychological need of sleep, even the institutional groups need space for the self-representation conflicts which are crossed. These spaces, to operate according to the principles of  representability dream, must have sufficient quality transformational. Mutations topological he has shown, indicate that, in institutions, we are in Read more

ANCESTRALSTORIES

A quick guide to the papers in this issue

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Paper Title: Genius Loci: A function of a group’s affective regulation

Author: Claudio Neri (Italy)

Summary

This paper builds a picture of a characteristic that is shared by both places and groups. Each place and each group has a “Genius Loci” which can be compared to a deity whose constant presence gives character, coherence and ‘spirit’ to that place or group. In nature… <<The Genius Loci tries to maintain a congenial balance between water, wind, vegetation, buildings etc. Conversely, it gets irritated if the characteristics and harmony of a specific place are changed by actions or gestures which are outside its nature>>.

In groups the genius loci works in harmony with the group leader, but is not the group leader. 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

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

Campo

Group Field in the Subjective Adolescent Constitution

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Abstract

In puberty-adolescence, the group allows and favours in the adolescent the pathway towards subjectivation, transmitting a feeling of social belonging through the use of games of reciprocal identifications. At the end of this process, the adolescent may think similarly, but at the same time differently, to the other members of the group, who are travel companions in the fundamental step from endogamy to exogamy. This transition guarantees the existence of cultural order which forms the basis of the social discussion and collectivity Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Dream in group experience

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Abstract

The group is a dream that cannot be explained, an experience influenced by institutional biases, that can however find reassurance in the conductor’s figure. Is dream a system of self representation for groups and persons capable of producing deep emotional meanings, unconscious language and expression for communicating Read more

ANCESTRALSTORIES

Presentation, Individual, Group and Nature

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The quality of our future depends more and more on environmental balance and its stability. Nevertheless, there’s a contradiction that’s difficult to explain, without entering into complex psychological processes – between the widespread interest the public opinion has for environmental issues and, on the other hand, how little this results in specific awareness, or in a different way of behaving, and ultimately in putting strong pressure on political leadership. In point of fact, how serious is the environmental issue? The greenhouse effect? Degenerative diseases? Or energy resources? These are problems that are already a reality, and today imply a dramatic prospect for our species. The greenhouse effect isn’t just a simple idea that represents the phenomenon as a gradual rise of the temperature of the planet’s soil, the melting of the polar ice cap or other flights of fancy. Today the stability of the climatic cycle is seriously effected, something our small country pays for every year Read more

ComeSpecchio

Lansquenet from “tranquillité” to play. Based upon the film Chocolat by Lasse Hallström

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Abstract

New is amazing, it affects senses, like a cold winter wind striking one’s face, like a red cloak standing out in the dullness of late winter night, like a good hot chocolate delighting even the most suspicious palate with its aroma, like exotic music attracting even the most insensible ears; new smells of spring and reawakening. On arriving inside a group it upsets its existing balance, which in some cases has become stale and stinks of death. At first new generates suspicion or even open rebellion, however it can awaken both Read more

PieroSogno

Dream telling as a request for containment – approaching dreams intersubjectively

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Abstract

The dream as a means of access to the contents of the individual and unconscious element in the psychoanalytic discipline is revisited in the light of inter-factor, considering the functions it performs within the group context, with particular reference to the nature of communication and relational request . Food for thought comes from clinical practice and require the viewer a ‘study Read more

PieroSogno

The group as place and substance of dream

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Abstract

The dream reported in a therapeutic group is one of the events which incisively characterizes its development; its frequence is comparable with that of other forms of psychotherapy and in any case its merit depends on the way the therapy is carried out. The dream considered in this contribution refers to that kind of group that achieves, even if in a discontinuous way, that state of emotional fusion among the members (Neri et al., 1990), so that it can be considered as “psyche-group”, set as such against the “socio-group” Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

A therapeutical community on its way towards dreaming

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Abstract

For about a year, that is since we have assumed the community project ‘therapeutic responsibility for the structure has been given to a psychiatrist (psychoanalytic psychotherapist) to which were joined a psychologist (group analyst and expert in institutional dynamics), a clinical psychologist doctor (psychoanalytic psychotherapist, expert group phenomena), a psychiatrist (psychotherapist with special training in psychodrama). The authors are two psychologists, one leads to an experiential group with members of the structure, the other part weekly group organization and planning. A brief description of some of the tracks the experiences of these two moments groupal. The authors from experience groupal, observe that in some places appear fantasies similar to those that occur during pregnancy: what seems to us to support the use of metaphor (the teacher who proposes the work on the garden perhaps testifies to a fantasy of care something that is growing, the mental group, the possibility of therapeutic work with patients, Read more

ANCESTRALSTORIES

The Individual, the Group and Nature

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Abstract

In this article, the author proposes to consider the complexity of the interconnections between individual, group and nature. Is there a link between mental representations of nature and psychological well-being. If the child is not, and ‘entity’ separate from the mother, the individual can not be seen isolated from its physical world. The relationship with nature and fundamental Read more

GauguinAnoressia

Monosymptomatic groups with anorexic and boulimic patients and basic assumptions: the somatic dimension in these patients and the position of the analyst

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Abstract

It is important to reflect upon Bion’s concepts about the basic group, as these groups are more and more growing. Many of them are centred and formed upon a symptomatology in which the somatic dimension is an important part in the subject disease entering the group. I believe that the first Bion purpose (1), -concerning his reflections upon basic assumptions – was to give a method and not only a theory to be tested 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