Archaic Process and Psychoanalysis of Linking

When I began conducting group analyses at the beginning of the 1970’s, the dogma of the drive seemed to me unsuited to psychoanalytic clinical work with respect both to individual treatment and to group work. I returned to reading British authors, in particular, W.R. Bion and R. Fairbairn, one of the main theoreticians of object-relations. Working with groups made it clear, in effect, that there was no drive without an object and that psychotherapeutic effects developed within the register of linking.Fairbairn develops two fundamental points in his critique of the concept of instinct, of Freud’s second topography, and of the psychical apparatus in Freud’s work: psychic structure in terms of object-relation and, from the economic point of view, energy is inseparable from psychic structure. At the end of his book, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1946), he recommends, within the logic of his theorisation, group work as being better adapted to the treatment of certain pathologies.If one refers to Bion’s group topography (work group, basic assumption, and protomental system), the invention of the protomental forges indissociable links between somatic and psychic experience, a point he was to maintain throughout his work. By paying particular attention to the act, he developed, as Meltzer suggests, a whole field of analysis that had hitherto been relegated to acting-out.This leads me to discuss archaic processes: synchronism, gestuality, primary group of belonging, cultural incorporated raw objects, and so on. The therapeutic relationship is thus not limited to thoughts and associations of ideas, but also includes somatic and somato-psychic experiences that are both endopsychic and at the basis of the networks of individual and collective primary relationships.