Relevance of Group Devices in the Psychological Treatment of Elderly Patients

Abstract

The work aims to demonstrate the relevance of groupal psychotherapies and think tanks in elderly patients, suffering from various psychiatric disorders. The exhibition focuses on the consideration of a structural problem of aging seen from the point of view defences and identifications, which some authors call “caracteropatización of old age”, resulting in stagnation in the development of treatments in therapeutic individual devices.

The paper postulates that groupal devices are more effective in treating patients older than treating individual cutting of different theoretical clinical guidelines, as are more suited to the production of mobilizing stiffened defences and crystallized identifications, won both by various effects of the death drive, which result in specific libidinal stasis, especially expressed in the substitutive formation called by some authors “letting die”.

The statement places the group devices in the Freudian model of cell tissues, herringbone in various texts of his work, but expressed in more detail in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, which postulates as the cause of the vital tension constellations composed of different but related cells. Communication is illustrated with clinical vignettes both therapeutic groups and think tanks, as with clinical material from patients who have received both individual treatment and group result of therapeutic work done in the Casabierta institution during the last ten years. As a conclusion and opening of new questions, the text pans across different forms of resistance indication of group psychotherapy, which rooted in many current social representations of the group and the therapeutic.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.