institutions Archivi - Funzione Gamma

Forms of institutions. Creative and Destructive Processes

11 September 2022/in Alfredo Lombardozzi, Thinking institutions/by @dmin

Abstract

This essay examines different aspects of the life of institutions. Through an analysis working on an anthropological and psychoanalytical level, contrasting yet coexisting aspects are brought to light. Beginning from an analysis of the recent film The Lobster, which describes an anguishing form of institutional Dystopia which favours conformist and destructive individual and group experiences, a comparison with those institutional forms that, on the contrary, take the shape of supportive and creative relationships is proposed. This work presents reflections on the relationships between specific emotional contexts in the psychiatric institutions, the ritual constructive and destructive behavioural aspects Read more

Institutions and economic science: links between cognitive processes and the emergence of social rules

11 September 2022/in Angela Ambrosino, Thinking institutions/by @dmin

Abstract

Standard economic theory has long underestimated the role of institutions in economic systems and in the processes of change, focusing on equilibrium and the mechanisms that determine it spontaneously. Equilibrium, once achieved, is only interfered by external shocks (exogenous shocks) and it is not disturbed by dynamics developing within the system. Institutions, in this theoretical framework, are functional to achieve efficient outcomes but play no role in the process of economic change (North, 1990).
On the other hand, the heterodox approach to the economics, targeting the research into the processes by which institutions emerge and change, highlights their importance in social dynamics. Economics of institutions changes the focus of the analysis: it does not start from the study of the effects that given institutions can have on the economic systems, but it focuses on individual behavior and on the cognitive processes that determine it. This research field investigates the dynamics through which the interaction between Read more

Leading from below? Decisions, responsibility and creativity as a group dynamic

11 August 2022/in Building a therapeutic community. A case of therapeutic engineering, Robert D. Hinshelwood/by @dmin

Abstract

The institution tends to organise the individual in standard ways. And individuals are vulnerable to being organised for the convenience of the institution. Probably psychiatric patients needing hospitalisation are especially vulnerable to this coercive influence.
This has for long been known as a ‘top-down’ authority. A smallish group or single leader at the top of the organisation’s hierarchy makes decisions for those lower down to follow. For 50 years or so from the 1940s, there was, in Western society, an attempt to reverse this structure with what is called ‘bottom-up’ authority. The therapeutic community was one Read more

Why psychoanalysis in times of poverty?

1 January 1970/in Alessandro Americo, The different applications of the group device, within clinical, social and organizational institutions/by @dmin

Abstract

The psychoanalytical group is characterized by a self-representative work and what happens within it, is considered as an useful material for putting in meaning the same group. Thoughts, affections, somatic expressions, sounds, noises, etc. tend to form a multi-dimensional tissue called with a good term, by Francesco Corrao (1979), <<self-interpreting context>>.
By this way the group can be operationally defined by the setting which establishes its limits but it is at the same time, in a dynamic relation with the reality’s levels in which it is immerged.
I try of placing with this article, some founding moments of Bion’s model which came from his experiences, in the way of highlighting, referring to the case of groups applied within institutional contexts, the importance since the origins, of a field’s perspective in which the clinic practice will never be a technical operation extracted from the institution but an integral part of it.
In a “ill” institution it is highly improbable that “healthy” groups can born and develop. The function of psychoanalysts during times characterized by a deep crisis of the human being, is the same of the poets in the Hölderlin’s poem which gives the title to this work: in other words the duty of de-objectifying reality from its de-symbolizing dimensions, bearing the darkness and the Read more

Tag Archive for: institutions

Posts