The One and the Many: Relational Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis

This book is a of papers written between 2002 and 2012 on the subject of group analysis and relational psychoanalysis. From the author’s point of view, these two disciplines are really the two sides of the same coin, since both explore and use therapeutically what happens in the interphase between individual and collective ways of existence. It is divided into three parts. The first deals with the construction of a theory that articulates individual, relational, and collective mental processes; the second, with the problems of interpretation from the hermeneutic, psychoanalytic, and group-analytic points of view; the third, with the clinic and applications of relational analysis and group analysis.

One major theme is the construction of a new metapsychology that may allow us to transcend the limitations of the individual paradigm that underlies Freudian theory and the mainstream versions of psychoanalysis. In this, there is an attempt to integrate the contributions of Sándor Ferenczi, the British Independents, S. H. Foulkes’s group analysis, Enrique Pichon-Rivière and the Latin-American tradition that stems from his though and practice, and present-day developments in relational psychoanalysis. This amounts to a “mestization” of a number of branches of psychoanalysis and group analysis that stem from the original Freudian roots.