ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the first vignette of developmental moment in a child's play and then traces the work of group therapy through three further vignettes. Concentrating in the second on how an individual's confusion between longing and belonging underlies a serious character problem that enjoys an opening sense of reparation at a key moment, early in his therapy. The terms longing and belonging generate by association a series of complementary titles that have a similar interplay or dialectic and hold a kind of emblematic significance. Every group can generate coherence in the construction of a distinctive set of references that Elias calls figurations, which Foulkes and Anthony brought into psychotherapy. The chapter focuses on language that goes beyond the words themselves. All language use that is evocative or denotative the framework of culture within Winnicott's intermediate territory works through idiom and metaphor. The world we inhabit is comprised of the real, the constructed and the representational.
