Abstract
The article presents the professional and emotional experience of the working group of psychologists engaged in home care and the management of the COVID-19 emergency.
The emotional impact of traumatic events for the individual and the community requires the set-up of a multi-level containment structure. Read more
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
Abstract
Organizational consultancy has been using methods and approaches of psychoanalytic origin for several decades now, especially when the problems involved seem to imply significant emotional and inter-personal aspects, that leaders, key figures and often the involved subjects themselves appear mostly unaware of or visibly unwilling to know.
A considerable amount of literature is now available so that those who are interested in this subject can study it in further depth in its various aspects and its multiple applications. The aim of this article is rather an attempt to better specify the “object” of these professional practises, providing some conceptual maps and tools for guidance that can help consultants (but managers as well) from an analytical or psychotherapeutic background not to get lost in a mare magnum of theories and techniques where a number of specific risks are present alongside questionable improvisations and methodologies for every season. I am not referring so much to the various possible forms of narcissistic seduction or omnipotent vocations which can drag a consultant into disaster or into perverse collusion with a client, but rather to the danger of losing sight of the object of one’s own work, simplifying its complex nature, dealing more with the people than the processes (or vice versa), reifying the organization or anthropomorphizing it, losing the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and concrete reality; all this is a setting which the consultant Read more
Abstract
This essay focuses on three topics. The first is related to a particular aspect of the relationship between individuals and the institution. The institution may or may not provide the individual with an image (mirroring) suited to for his/her needs and responsibilities. This image and its possible failings have an impact not only on professional identity, but also on deep, fundamental aspects of the self. The second topic concerns the triangular relationship between the individual, small groups and the institution. Between the individual and the institution, a small group of friends and colleagues may find space. This small group has different functions to those of the institution, yet can take over those functions if the institution fails to Read more
Abstract
Recent developments in psychoanalytic outreach researches have offered ever more convincing evidences of a circular, mutual relationship between the internal world, the group and the external society. From such point of view, the author explores the current crisis scenarios of the welfare and the parallel crisis of credibility and market of the psychoanalytic therapy. He suggests that in the future psychoanalysis could shift its focus from individual treatment to the study of group and institution, to the point of recasting itself as a “clinical approach to organizations” to improve efficiency, awareness and well-being in the workplaces. To make it happen, it is necessary for psychoanalysis to overcome the mistrust for interdisciplinary dialogue with other approaches, methods and disciplines, and the discomfort Read more
Abstract
The article intends to suggest a reflection about the process of the formation of a limited time group of therapy in a mental health care center located in Rome, Asl Roma 2. The aim is to focus on the delicate process of transition from individual to group therapy in a Public Institution, which involves several implications.
We will try, in this regard, to point out its advantages and some critical issues related to the care service background. We will explore the functioning of the patients in group therapy and then among the staff. We will consider the difficulties arising, and the opportunities the transition from individual Read more
Abstract
This contribution is inspired by the experience of conducting a therapeutic group for adult patients within a medium security psychiatric community in Milan. Using some session excerpts, a close connection is established between affirmation of identity of individuals and the group, along with freedom of expression, as the Read more
Abstract
Using psychodrama with psychotics in Institutions that work on territory, makes a significant time of a journey into the group, where the psychotic “takes value” in presence. In this article the group of psychodrama is introduced as the instrument that authorizes each member of an institution to face up the complex realities Read more
Abstract
Today’s clinical, the undetermined of the contemporaneous aspects, for example what we call the borderline cases or the whole cohort of the depressive, maybe have to be considered like the symptom of a society without projects, without hope, if not for an immediate satisfaction. The emotion we have is that often the metaphoric function of words is scraped out and the function of images dominates. Nevertheless we don’t have to forget that each person approaches imaginative shapes of symbolization before approaching verbal shapes. We should also consider the family’s role and the one of the new families the one of the subjective consequences of the progressive disappearance of the father’s symbolic function. This function has been regained in an authoritative manner from the society and it’s Read more
Abstract
We could affirm that in the Institution’s base, that has mental health as an aim, in a paradoxical way we can find a primitive psychic functioning, thus infantile. This infantile position seems to constitute the link between the three original objects: Institution, therapist, parents. The three objects are linked by a common affiliation and by a shared common area and are tied together by dynamic intense interrelationships, which are all characteristics of groups. We could them make the hypothesis of the constitution of a macro-group with a macro multi-personal field in which the unconscious fantasy consists in that primitive mentality that we can find in Bion’s basic assumptions. We have been able to see that in this multi-personal field there is an issue that settles and acts, transferring itself from an object to another. This issue represents itself in the infantile part carrier of proto-mental contents equipped with a high emotional potential, Read more
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
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
Abstract
Those who wish to concern themselves with training in the psycho-somatic field and, in particular, in the psycho-oncological field need to face the constant work of working through the passage from defensive splitting to operational splitting. A psychoanalytically trained observer, who comes into contact with an institution, as G.Vetrone says (1986), is quite soon aware of the fact that inappropriate splitting operates within it, for he discovers with amazement, anxiety and disdain, that some human needs are denied and the patient is related to as if he were a part-object. Recognising the splitting is a sterile operation if one does not understand the specific anxiety which made such a defence necessary. The observer must be able to identify not only with the more evident suffering, that of the patient, but also with that of the carers, which is generally more difficult to recognise precisely because, through splitting it Read more