Multi-Family Psychoanalysis Groups (MFPG) were started by Jorge Garcia Badaracco in the Sixties in Argentina. In a MFPG several families gather together and the focus of the discussion is how relationships among people work, rather than directly aiming at fighting psychotic symptoms.
One can access the group with his/her relatives, or on his/her own.
One can speak or just listen. Since it is a psychoanalytic group, there is no prearranged topic: the discussion is about different experiences and the word of each participant is worth the word of the others.
Operators (usually at least three of them for each group) facilitate the discussion enhancing the pathological and pathogenic interdependences that the participants’ experiences show. Pathological and pathogenic interdependences are those repetitive and entrapping mechanisms typical of the relationships in families where suffering is present.
Thanks to the metaphoric mirroring (the phenomenon by which listening to the story of what happens in another family I can think about what happens in my home, considering similarities and differences) participants can increasingly understand how their relationships do work and how they wish to change them.
Such a decisive phenomenon for change is not channeled just by the therapeutic nature of the group, rather it is greatly facilitated by the diversity of encounters that are possible among participants, hence by the freedom to identify with another person that each participant can experience.
The resulting atmosphere of respect and solidarity further fosters the work.
The MFPG is in fact open to anybody who whish to participate and, in our experience of a private, community-centered facility, the group is available in two versions: one for adults, and one for families with adolescents. A clinical example and a short video will be presented.
Group analytic and psychoanalytic group therapies , Early intervention , Other family work
