Abstract

In this contribution there are two main questions related to clinical conceptualizations in the psychoanalytic field which can be adopted in the work with the anorexic patients. 1. The first concerns the question of whether anorexia can be described as an independent psychoneurosis, such as, in Freud’s classification of psychoneurosis, the obsessive syndrome. 2. The second question concerns the possibility of conceiving that when the patients are disturbed at the oral level, or more generally in articulated and borderline ways for other factors of identity immaturity and traumatism, it can be useful to treat themi within a social body, i.e. the group. The group’s setting work apparatus in fact, re-actualizing the original experience of indistinctness and stimulating by contrast (see the idea of ​​a counter-field in Marinelli, 2004) the need to differentiate itself from that one, when it has been transformed – can be imagined as a single body, which can create the re-generation and re-birth of the parts/organs and of the whole/organism. In this sense the two different levels of work that are intertwined in the group setting are compared: as a register of intersubjective exchange and as a common and shared field and a single body capable of evolving. The reference to Bion’s model and its fundamental notion of “O” as the ultimate truth, to be listened to and searched for in the mind/protoment of the subject as well in the mind/proto-mind of the group, contains a reference to the meaning of the homogeneous composition of the group, which is treated here.

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