The borderline functioning of the community team: a clinical example

The first condition of a real process of "taking charge" of the patient in the community is the construction of a container, such as the multidisciplinary work team, that is able to take charge of itself. More than as a fact, a conception that is too easily inclined to slip into a sort of "idealization" of the "perfect" setting, it is preferable to think of this as a tension towards, an actively pursued potential. Through a series of examples and short clinical vignettes the author explores the most typical configurations that can be observed in the work teams. The basic hypothesis is that a large part of the so-called negative therapeutic reactions, blocks or impasses that characterise operations, base their raison d'être on the forclusion of experiences and thoughts that are too easily perceived as belonging exclusively to the universe of the patients. Psychoanalysis, with its inclination for the oneiric, free associations, freely fluctuating attention, constitutes a gaze capable of alluding to a temporary suspension of asymmetry, which allows the recovery of a cogency of meanings and makes it possible for us to understand the other starting from ourselves.