Editorial

Thematically, this issue of the Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis is the continuation of the previous issue's works, with both issues being subsumed under the heading Groups and Institutions. In this issue, the authors analyse the group and the institution as actors of psychological life, questioning the functioning of the small group in the parent-child or analyst-analysand relationship, the collective groupality of the totalitarian system, the fundamental role of the group in the constitution and knowledge of individuality as well as the role of the group and the institution in the prevention and therapeutic assistance of psychological suffering.

Brînduşa Orăşanu's article, Group portrait with a lady and its concrete character, discusses how sensoriality, symbolization, individuality and groupality are expressed in Heinrich Böll's novel Group Portrait with Lady. The author explores Böll's idea of the status of each word as a unique linguistic entity, charged with history and meaning, illustrating this assumption with examples and reflections from analytical practice. Also, through a direct reference to the title of the novel, Brînduşa Orăşanu synthesises the most important concepts concerning the psychoanalysis of group phenomena, concepts by Didier Anzieu, Eugène Enriquez, René Kaës, René Roussillon and Paolo Fonda. In the chapter Leni and her groups, the author explains how the concrete group and the abstract group, the vertical group and the horizontal group coexist in the same image/description. Here, too, Leni's ability “to stand alone in front of the group” is analysed, a gesture and ability considered by Heinrich Böll to be an indication of “pure humanism at its most naïve”, a quality Brînduşa Orăşanu calls “counter-group individuation”. Another character in Heinrich Böll's novel - Pelzer - is presented in terms of a painful struggle to access individuation and humanism, the desire to differentiate from the large group “of the Nazi counter-culture” (, apud