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

Donne

From counsciousness raising to women’s groups of the 21st century

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Abstract

Female sociality, which began in spaces and times far removed from domestic society, has been organizing itself in modern societies as the feminist movement, of whose history is evoked by the author, generating through the various historical stages new representations of women, that are able to contribute to the possibility of a new Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

The impact of the female analytic group leader’s gender as revealed in dreams of male members: a clinical exploration

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Abstract

The psychoanalytic literature has always believed that the sex of the therapist is not a significant variable in treatment. Eroticized transference has positive potential, facilitating, restorative and invigorating. “Eroticized” capture the plasticity of sexuality, and creative ways of human beings who can be loved, and eroticize Read more

ANCESTRALSTORIES

Psyche and enviroment

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Abstract

The psyche, in the totality of conscious and unconscious processes, is revealed through the image, thought, and language, and within the group phenomena in relation with the environment. Within this framework are the concepts of protomental and psychoid, respectively, in Bion and Jung, as well as the implications of transference and countertransference, but also in Read more

Unitas Multiplex The therapeutic function of a rite in group psychoanalysis and traditional treatment. Convergence and diversity

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Abstract

The author is inspired by metaphor “Unitex Multiplex”, he thought that taking inspiration from this metaphor would be a good beginning in order to  produce a piece of work on groups from the psychoanalytical and anthropological points of view, using multiple approaches, and, at the same time be an attempt to come up with unitary parameters.So, will be further explained to the complexity of ideas that are relative to the therapeutic function in groups. One has also to pay particular attention to the mythical-ritual aspects and also take the contingent factors of the meeting that a small analytical group has into account. These factors possess elements of similarity but are also different from those that are specific to a social group that puts rite into play. The author  would now likes to enlarge upon the classical idea of Tarantismo by addressing Ernesto de Martino’s well known study and enlarge upon it with an experience of child group analysis. A common aspect regards a musical ritual that is a structuring element in the Puglia therapeutic rite, whilst in a group of children, it seems to establish a fluid, passionate element that opens up to a different group formation. In the last part the author  would now likes to try and express the idea around which the reflection on the “Gods’ Read more

PieroSogno

Group and women’s dreams

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Abstract

The paper I present to you refers in a certain way to a traditional work: the process of finding and giving sense to some recurrent dreams in long-term psychoanalytically oriented therapeutic women’s groups. But I propose to you, though not being in the specific setting, to “treat“ now these dreams in the mental attitude suggested by Gordon Lawrence in his “Social Dreaming”, almost “dreaming them again”, giving space to the echo, to our associations. As they come from the shared experience of our cultural context where our fears and desires as males and females take shape. Moreover, though relating to a “traditional” work of giving sense to dreams, the process through which the sense came to light was due to a long staying in the “negative capacity”, to the “attentive passivity” David Armstrong underlines in his contribution to “Social Dreaming”. The “attentive passivity” is always necessary in our therapeuts’ life but it has Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Oneiric icons: the construction of their significance, value and meaning in the group

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Abstract

Icons avoid the disintegration of the transgenerational favoring the passage from mental continuity with the psychic world familiar to mental discontinuity with the same, which is necessary for the development of an alterity that is the discovery of “what’s different on me.” The group aims at this stage, as the matrix “other”, with its own history, different identically story brought by the individual, at the base of the immutability of mental health problems. The group becomes the site of emergence of a more authentic self, which does not need a mask or to project its Otherness (diversity) from the original matrix of a world of images as far as you near your unconscious that Read more

Donne

Research on the gender in the composition of a workshop of photography for schizophrenics, its role in the therapeutic efficiency

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Abstract 

The present research studies the effects of the gender, in a workshop of expression of a photolanguage type within schizophrenic adults. The initial question was the one of a possible influence of the composition of the groups of therapy, in terms of gender, during the observed processes What is the incidence of the distribution of gender on the Read more

ANCESTRALSTORIES

Experiencing interaction: what makes up the bonds of relations with the world?

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Abstract

The author of the article identifies a constant interactive relationship between people and the world to which they belong, and describes the personal experience of using the interactive link with various outdoor environments. The testing of unknown landscapes opens new routes and new knowledge. experience is not separable from perception, emerges through interconnected systems, are interconnected as well as body-mind-world. The knowledge is through experiencing the flow of actions. The interaction, Read more

Dream interpretation; from traditional cultures to group psychotherapy

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Abstract

It’ s not surprising that both in western societies and traditional societies, dream interpretation is contextualized socially and culturally. Dream is a human experience, that is filtered through the lenses of our language, our social values, and cultural symbolism. By focusing on how dreams have been used in traditional cultures: the creative potential of dreams, the role of guide and omen, the knowledge that is gained through dreams, the passage to other dimensions and worlds; all these functions that have been analysed by many anthropologists and they allow us to look at dreams from another point of view. A dream that is told in group therapy, can underline the need and the willingness of the group to face the shared unconscious and to develop a connection with the unthinkable. There is a difference between dreaming, that can be considered as intra-psychic event and narrating a dream which by definition is an interpersonal event. In Read more

PieroSogno

Dreaming and Thinking in the Group

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Abstract

If we consider the group and the individual as different points of a continuum, the commonly accepted ontological dichotomy between the individual and the group will become obsolete, from the moment that specifically human individuality will be seen in relational terms, resulting in an encounter not only between different individuals but also an encounter between different forms of groups. When group therapeutic work starts, intrapsychic aspects become communicable through the interactions that transform the unconscious and archaic aspects of communication into socially shared experiences; thus, the experience and the story of the group become individually and internally represented, in a sharing of reciprocal transformation. My principal references in psychoanalysis are the theories on object relations that have largely contributed to psychoanalytical studies thanks to the relational paradigm. This paradigm emphasizes above all the Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Dream, group and toucht Thoughts about a dream of Didier Anzieu

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Abstract

The relationship between thought, the subject, the group and the dream. From a reading of a dream of  D. Anzieu given in the context of an interview and published, the author has placed emphasis on the components groupal thought that this dream appears to stage. The group is the operator required a cleavage fruitful. To think is to project the group that the subject can’t bind. The thought is marked by reports that the subject has with internal and external Read more

Donne

Women in groups in Italy today and yesterday. Social change and inner transformations in three decades

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Abstract

Author’s reference theory
As group Psychoanalyst the author refers to Ferdinando Vanni’s Interactive Group Theory (1988, 1992).
In F. Vanni’s theory Interactive groups are characterized by interactional communicative exchanges among participant. In these exchanges an “interactive” self emerges: the “self-in-others”.
This “self-in-others” presents itself as an indifferentiated Self which allows parts of personality to be projected, reflected or induced in others. The leader of an interactive group will then, as a first step, activate feed-backs from participants in order to recognize projections and inductions. He/she will, as a second step, begin the psychoanalytic working through, thus allowing the remodelling of self through group exchanges.
Interactive Group Theory refers to mixed gender groups.
In all women’s groups interactional communicative exchanges have revealed specific therapeutic power.
Relaxations of boundaries between individual selves derive from the affective quality of women’s interactions in group cultures like Interchangeability (Cantarella, 2002; 2005), Read more

ANCESTRALSTORIES

Facilitating Change: Boundaries and the Human-Nature Dialectic

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Abstract

The author examines the relationship between man, nature and the tightness’ of the boundaries of the species. The individual relates to family and community, as  a set of individuals from which it derives its integrity, and self-awareness.
Expand the boundaries and ‘a way to open new possibilities for exploring human culture and its relationship with nature. The classical psychoanalysis has explored the cultural world as separate from the outside. But the individual and the group are placed in the broader Read more

Comments to the interview with Balbino

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Abstract

The interest that such an interview brings about is in comparing an interpretative system of dream that is different to the model proposed by psychoanalysis and that was initially elaborated around the clinical individual cure. The interview poses questions that we must solve using other analytical systems, such as that of group analysis or family therapy: Who dreams in the dream? How can telepathic dreams be understood, the shared and mutual dreamlike space? The practice of shaman dreams, the different traditional therapeutic practices used via the means of dream, the dreamlike journeys of the Pumé of the Andes, all these issues that have been highlighted and analysed by numerous anthropologists Read more

PieroSogno

The Group, The Body and Dreaming with Eyes Wide Open

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Abstract

The author describes a narration/dream narrated by a patient in a group of adolescents, with which she wants to comunicate to all the members of the group her changements. The author shows the group can stimulate a real process of transformations, properly in the body, if it is conduced in an active way and he describes a particular method G.R.F., that he uses with Read more