ABSTRACT
Enrique Pichon Riviere was a pioneer who coined a large number of concepts and engaged in practices as diverse as individual, couple, and family analysis, group and institutional analysis, and the study of art, advertising, and everyday life. This chapter examines a specific theoretical development in depth and describes some general applications of this notion that are critical to present-day analytic work. It discusses Riviere's writings in a more general way. Instead of addressing individual psychology, Pichon Riviere focused on links between subjects. He considered many issues stemming from this approach, but he hardly imagined that nearly forty years after his death his ideas would see such remarkable development. Pichon Riviere's idea is that groups establish a new psychic reality that differs from the reality of individual group members and that as it unfolds, it exerts influence on them.
