ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of the developments. Nonetheless, it is useful to describe, not the events and their sequences but, rather, the principal orientations of the research, the accentuations and tendencies that finally constituted the elements of psychoanalytic thinking about the group. The chapter shows how the group poses a problem for psychoanalytic theory and practice, in the hope that, by identifying its contributions and its obstacles, issues for debate will emerge concerning the fundamental objects of psychoanalysis, the extent of its domain. And the frontiers that it sets for itself in its contemporary practice. When psychoanalysts found that they were faced with the necessity of inventing an alternative to the individual treatment, the group setting quite quickly appeared to be adequate for certain patients. Psychoanalysis has a different objective: namely, to liberate the psyche from its psychic impediments.
