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Saggi

No. 1-2 (2023)

Formation and transformations in analytical groups

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/gruoa1-2-2023oa21208
Submitted
ottobre 7, 2025
Published
2025-10-23

Abstract

The Author highlights the anchoring of the classical psychoanalytic model to the epistemological paradigm of linear simplicity, or originality. The “simplicity” of an interpretation understood as the univocal translation of unconscious language inevitably comes into crisis in the face of the group, a reality that can only be “embraced” through an epistemology of complexity. The author describes the orders of complexity specifically experienced in a group setting (whole/part, subject-observer/object-observed), which are inextricably intertwined with the identificatory complexity (internal group dynamics). In his view, interpretation is rather a narrative or constructive act in which each participant in the analytical relationship gives meaning to their own experience of traversing that “group material” of which they are a part. He then focuses on the concepts of formation and con-formation to argue that an analytical practice moving within a narrative-hermeneutic horizon, that methodically prioritizes lived experience, is necessarily characterized as a transformation practice of the relationships present in the analytical field, a process that implies a crisis for all interlocutors of their respective petrified “formations”. In this mutual process of formation the specific position of the analyst is based on a greater “negative capability” that allows them to keep alive their function as a “supervisor” of interpretative acts.

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