The Big Other and the Small Ties: Group Therapeutics in Adolescents with Psychotic Structure

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between psychoanalysis, adolescence, psychosis, and therapeutic group work. Through a literature review within the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, it explored how therapeutic groups can serve as spaces for socialization and subjective development for adolescents with a psychotic structures. Adolescence is presented as a stage in which the relational world tends to expand beyond the family, so that peer relationships bring into play the function of the similar in subjective formation. Based on the articulation of concepts from the Lacanian field, the study discusses the potentialities of group encounters, in which the invasive Big Other in psychotic subjective formation can be counterposed by relations with little others. In this way, the possibility of constructing the Social Bond, so challenging in psychosis, is broadened through the creation of small bonds in relation to others. Thus, the group was considered as a strategy of the expanded psychoanalytic clinic, emphasizing the function of the similar as a therapeutic tool that enables more horizontal identifications, fostering belonging and mutual recognition in peer relations.