SGAI – Italian Group-Analytic Society
A Presentation

La Group Analysis is a discipline, originating from psychoanalysis, founded by T. Burrow and later developed by S.H. Foulkes in its theoretical and methodological aspects.
In the 1960s Foulkes founded the "Group Analytic Society of London", which became a model for other Group Analysis Associations later created around the world. In Milan the Associazione Milanese di Analisti di Gruppo (AMAG) was founded in 1974.
In 1982 the association changed its title-name to Società GruppoAnalitica Italiana (SGAI). The Rome-based Istituto di Gruppoanalisi (IGAR), founded in 1968 by Fabrizio Napolitani, joined the newly-named association in 1990.
SGAI qualifies in the group-analytic movement for the new developments it has given to group-analytic theory, the guidelines of which were presented for the first time in an international context by Diego Napolitani at the 7th World Group Psychotherapy Congress (Copenhagen 1980).
The historical roots of the Group-Analytic model, coherently elaborated by SGAI, lie in the “relational” current of psychoanalytic thought, already widely present in the non-deterministic part of Freud’s works. Its most relevant representatives are S. Ferenczi (particularly for his elaboration of the introjective identification concept ), W.R.D. Fairbairn (investment shifts from object to relation), D.W. Winnicott (creativity and transitional area), W. Bion (the concepts of protomentality, basic assumptions and transformation in relation to becoming).
The group-analytic model elaborated by SGAI is therefore founded on a selective combination of theoretical segments from relational psychoanalysis which finds a synthesis with the concepts of trans-personality and of dynamic matrix in Burrow and Foulkes.
These clinical and theoretical assumptions have been progressively structured by the perspectives opened up by the Complexity Paradigm, thanks to which it has been possible to integrate in a single model the epistemological foundations of an eco-systemic approach, hermeneutic phenomenology, the latest knowledge from the field of cognitive biology centered on Maturana’s and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis (self-making) and several contributions from genetic anthropology.
The clinical and theoretical axes characterizing the Group-Analytical model, as developed by SGAI, may be summarized with the following three points:

a) The ‘mind’ is ‘relation’, and mental processes, i.e. the complex of interactions between individual and environment, can be distinguished phenomenologically according to three basic types (the relational universes, known as Real, Imaginary and Symbolic).
These interactions are structural (an individual unrelated to an environment is unimaginable, nor is it possible to imagine an environment not conceived by an individual), and their nature is characterized by recursivity (any modification circularly involves the very agent of the same modification).
Individual identity, with the same structural and recursive characteristics, is a whole made up of the interactions between the internalized environment (the idem) and a self-organizing principle (the autos) of the same ‘internal environment’.

b) Group Analysis is a hermeneutic practice aiming at the construction of consistent meaning hypotheses for internal/external relational experiences: this praxis, in its autopoietic originality on the symbolic level, contrasts with the tendency to repetitiveness (“repetition compulsion”) of the consciousness and affection mechanisms learnt in the subject’s original environment (the family matrixes).

c) The “group” in “Group Analysis” refers to the “internal groupness”, which is pertinent to the group analysis concept of “matrix”. This implies that such an analytical practice is not restricted to a group setting, because the analysis of internal groupness can be carried out both in a group and in a dual context.

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