The Institutional Space: Belonging and Transmission

Abstract

Abstract Psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic institution are inseparable from analytical training and practice. However, the two terms are not equivalent. Psychoanalysis refers firstly – or should refer – to the work of the analyst, in their office – their own – space, with their analysts. However, the analyst belongs to another space: a professional group, a community, respectively an association or a society – an institution. The psychoanalytic institution, in turn, guarantees the transmission of the rules of the profession of the analyst. Psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic institution are linked to the professional activity and ethical principles of its members. The founding power of psychoanalysts, that is, the power to set up an institution and make it evolve, is based on the professional activity and the commonly created and respected deontological matrix. The vitality and sustainability of this activity depends mainly on the quality of the shared common psychoanalytic space, on the processes of psychoanalysis containment, transformation, and transmission by each analyst and by the whole group, at the same time. These are some of the lines of debate that we propose in this paper on psychoanalytic groups and institutions.