ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the main subject of the book, a theme that has occupied author since the beginning of analytic studies in the early 1970s: that of the relation between the individual and the group, which is perhaps more accurately stated in terms of individual and collective mental processes. It also deals with socio-psychological theories and the theory of communication as a necessary complement to the psychoanalytic approach. In 1954, the New York Psychoanalytic Society convened a symposium in Arden House on “The widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis”. At the time, the widening scope referred to the possibility of treating severely disturbed patients, who had not been previously considered adequate for a psychoanalytic treatment. Indeed, most schisms in the psychoanalytic movement were derived from divergences about the influences on and the role played by environmental and social factors in psychic life.
