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From Jung to Bion: an infinite bridge

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Abstract

Jung’s thought has underground and profoundly influenced Bion’s work. Ostracized by the mainstream of the more traditional psychoanalytic discourse, the creativity of Jungian research has forcefully re-emerged in Bion’s thought in his revolution of psychoanalytic theory and technique. The Jungian transcendent function, the synergy of conscious and unconscious, has become in Bion’s “binocularity” of the mind: the search for synchronicity between conscious and unconscious processes. Jung’s collective unconscious has merged into the conception of a substantially groupal and intersubjective “protomental”. Jung’s emphasis on waking visions allowed Bion to consider how our mind dreams night and day, both in sleep Read more

sogno e gruppo

Dreamtelling as a request for containment and elaboration in group therapy

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Abstract

The traditional, intrapersonal way of working with dreams has been enriched by an interpersonal approach (Ferenczi, 1913, Kanzer 1955). Dreaming may no longer be viewed as an exclusively internal and autonomous working-trough (event) occurrence, as classical approaches suggest (Freud 1900, 1932, Meltzer 1983). Containment and elaboration of the exciting and the dreadful in dreams can be placed on a continuum from autonomous through dependent. Sharing a dream with a therapist or a therapy group may be done (unconsciously) in order both to represent the self (Neri 1996) and “use” significant others to further the unfinished psychic work of the dream. When the dreamer’s own container for the unbearable is insufficient or damaged, he may search for an external container, as he may have done in his childhood . Group participants may sometimes serve as appropriate recipients for split-off emotions, and by listening to their “echoes” all involved may be helped to integrate projections and work them through. A clinical vignette of a Read more