Group psychotherapy with children: a classic psychoanalytic approach

Transforming a group of children into a psychoanalytic psychotherapy group requires certain conditions ranging from the analyst's anticipation of the group, a precise space-time organisation of the sessions, to the application of the rules of free association and abstinence. Satisfied with these conditions, the analyst leads his group accompanying it and favouring the topical and formal regression of thought for the construction of the group psychic apparatus and the tuning of the psyche of individuals, thus delimiting the intersubjective spaces included in the group matrix. In this article the author presents the first sessions of a group of children, constitutive moments of this apparatus and of the base of the group psychic matter, whose evolution, expressed by the interphantasmisation of the children during the sessions of the group life, will involve the transformations of the intrapsychic part of each of them.