The authors propose a reflection on a time-limited psychoanalytic group for children, adolescents and families, run in a public service. Some patients in the group give accounts of violent relationships and traumatic experiences. The accounts of violent, interpersonal and intrapsychic relationships influence the group’s capacity of thinking, which leads to difficulties in the processing of symbolic aspects. The fundamental question is that of whether it is possible to work in a time-limited, institutional, psychoanalytical framework, in which psychotherapists have to attempt to give meaning to experiences which take place in a repetitive present, in a space/time in which the prospect of a conclusion appears to be inconceivable. By means of a clinical example, and with particular emphasis on the first sessions and the dream brought up by a patient who has been a victim of domestic violence, the authors discuss the possibility of modifying, chiefly from within, the feeling of the immutability of early psychic material, which is itself intrinsically violent.