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In this paper I would like to take up the idea that there are institutional bases to the reality of the unconscious wish within the members of a team whose primary task is to care for subjects in distress. This leads me to wonder on what dimensions and functions of the institution the project of care is based and how the need for care is formulated in the institution. A specific place must be made amongst these dimensions for the unconscious alliances, pacts and contracts that are struck between the subjects - carers and cared for - in the institution.
These questions formulated from the clinical work of and on carers lead to the following: what is involved in providing care? Although it is hardly possible to answer it directly, my hypothesis is that the caring capacity is not the sole property of the individual subjects, but a property of the team formed by these subjects, in their intersubjective and institutional links; we are dealing therefore with an intermingling of links, with different logical levels, with separate psychic locations and places.
A second hypothesis is possible: not only are there, within the institution, elements that support the caring capacity of the team workers, but it may be these very elements that interfere with it. Our experience confronts us with the ambivalence involved in a founding activity, ambivalence which can be seen as one of the causes of the institutional reversal whereby an institution whose task is to provide care ends up operating a reversal of its aims and functioning so that it becomes a non-caring and even an anti-caring institution. This drifting away from and reversal of the primary task of the institution are not linked solely to the instinctual ambivalence located in the pair of opposites: caring-making ill. This dual move is inscribed within the organising phantasy which supports the unconscious positions of the subjects within an institution. Such a phantasy, or more often a phantasy configuration, constitutes the