Therapist

The therapeutic group with object mediator (like the game Feelings), is thought within an institutional space of care, in articulation with other therapeutic times, in connection with the rest of the care teams.

Because of its functions of containment and creative transformation, this mediation group will implement processes of symbolization, for the benefit of patients for whom a therapeutic indication has been proposed.

The choice of the playful mediator is the bearer of the therapist’s investment. The latter, by its ability to fade, to distance itself from the object, allows the other to appropriate and invest his own pleasure and his own creativity.

Being part of the group, the therapist is a benchmark on which patients can rely and to which they can identify. Thanks to its attention and dreaming abilities, the therapist can welcome and help patients to transform their thoughts, to make them representable : it allows them to channel and develop their affects, in an assimilable form (Bion’s alpha function).

Determining a space of speech centered on the game, it contains the drives and the projections of the patients. In this way, with this mediation object, it guarantees the protection and excision functions of the group. It gives everyone the opportunity to attack the frame of the group without destroying it, which allows the patient to access a thought, an affect not experienced as too dangerous, which reassures him about his own destructiveness.

Thanks to the work of creation of the situations that the therapist supports, each one can safely evoke his own history by depositing problems that concern him, and confront them with the reactions of the other patients. This process of resonating the imaginary is likely to mobilize a psychic work in the patient with production of meaning, which can lead to beneficial awareness. Thus, through his psychic presence, he facilitates creative possibilities within the game.

The therapist is the guarantor of the framework, within the group that it animates, in connection with the institution to which it belongs.