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

MatissePsicoterapiadiGruppo

Day treatment programs for personality disorders: a review

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Abstract

This paper is a modification of a chapter that will appear in the forthcoming volume: “Handbook of Personality Disorders: theory, research, and treatment,” edited by W. John Livesley, PhD, MD, FRCP, published by Guildford Publications: New York, release date April 2001. The original chapter will be entitled “Partial Hospital Programs.” It suggests that more partial hospitalization programs dedicated to the personality-disordered patients should become available and that more rigorous studies need to be conducted in the future, considering the main difficulties with the treatment in the day hospital, the therapeutic program to organize, the relations with the Read more

PieroSogno

Daydreams of an adolescents group and of its conductor

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Abstract

The author thinks that the group as well can sometimes be dreamed like the place were dreaming is not forbidden but instead it is accepted with wide open arms and were reality can go in the background.  The meaning of the word dream that the author would like to give is the one of “daydream” typical of those youngsters that have lost or that have a very low Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Group and dream in departments of organic illness. The homogeneous group in the hospital department

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Abstract

So that what seems significant to us, relative to the theme of the groups iconic and oneiric production, concerns its specific function in the group dealing with organic illness. This function is connected with the need to represent the bodys internal events, to give them a shape and communicable expression, to provide them with a sense which can be shared and mentally represented. The understanding of these representational elements, so important for re-establishing the ties between body and mind and between trauma and rebuilding, may set in hand a process of transformation and evolution. In particular, in the group considered, it was possible to pinpoint levels which were more and more touched by the affections of a central fantasy connected with the neoplastic illness: the annihilating and fragmenting invasion of the tumour, bearer of anxiety of death, corresponds to an early primitive defect, connected with problems of inseparability, which gave rise to an area of ice, devoid of life and absolutely inconceivable, invasive and generating death to the point of persecution, to be ashamed of. The organisation of this fantasy, fostered by dreaming, enables the group to pass from a concrete, symmetrical and specular arrangement, of the Read more

MatisseFormazione

Group analysis of those who deal with dying

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Abstract

To build up the trust of the participants in a group with dying patients, the therapist must make himself available as a transitional object due to the intense need for an object and the need for dependence expressed by the participants. On the other hand, the need to empathise with such strong and painful sentiments can represent a challenge for the therapist, activating powerful counter-transference reactions, such as fear of being overwhelmed, anger and negation. If the therapist knows how to deal with this delicate equilibrium, the group will be able to provide valuable aid for coming to terms with, and to integrate, the profound and ambivalent unconscious feelings evoked by Read more

PieroSogno

Presentation, Mith, Dream and Group

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In May, 1999 the first issue of Funzione Gamma went on-line. The theme was Dream and Group. Not long after, a second issue on that same theme came out. Three years have gone by and the ninth and current issue focuses on the theme which is Dream, Myth and Group, once again. In a few days time, there will be a further issue which deals with this theme. The scientific committee and the editorial staff believe that this theme is of fundamental importance not only for those who work in the group therapy field, but also for those who come from other disciplines which deal with the relationship between individual and group. A large number of dreams Read more

PieroSogno

The Problem Solving Function of Dreams in Children’s Groups

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Abstract

In this paper I will be referring to two dreams. The first dream was told by a little girl aged ten and a half, in a group that has been going for three years now, and is held in my rooms. The second was dreamt by a girl aged nine and a half who is a member of the same group. She told it to her mother who referred it to me. I am describing these dreams for a particular reason. Above all I wish to emphasize the centrality that I believe the problem solving function (and the narration that results from it) has in the dreaming 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