La Parole Et Le Lien. Processus Associatif Dans Les Groupes. [Words And The Link. The Associative Process In Groups]. : By R. Kaës. Paris: Dunod, Collection Psychismes, 1994.

This book by René Kaës, which is as appealing and evocative as it is intellectually rigorous, continues the study and analysis of group psychoanalytic processes begun in Le groupe et le sujet du groupe [The group and its subject] in 1993. This time the focus is on associative processes; the presentations of clinical sequences are particularly clear and precise.

For instance, we can see exactly how it is that one of the participants becomes the spokesperson for the group, how another becomes its ‘symptom person’, or how the associations of several group members arise and organise themselves from a dream or comment by a participant who then falls silent but continues to elaborate his own associative chain on an intersubjective basis from the interventions of the others.

I was particularly struck by two episodes in this clinical account. The first shows a participant generating a traumatic effect in the group by reporting an old trauma of his, of which he conveys the affect and not the content, implicitly asking for reparation. The analysis of the subsequent sequences lends great plausibility to Kaës's hypothesis of a group psychic apparatus and the possibility of working through the trauma by the associativity of the group. Because the group tends to generate crisis, and because there is an affinity between trauma and the group situation, the group is able to overcome the traumatic effect by a re-elaboration. The second episode concerns a surprising variation of the setting whereby the participants are placed back to back (for the purpose of research on the associative process), as well as its effects. This sequence, which is then subjected to detailed analysis, actually shows that this modification directly affects the content of the associations, which seem to be attempting to mitigate its effects—the latter being at first disorganising and then revealing. At this point there begins a depressive elaboration that eventually moves relatively on to the level of play; thi