Abstract

Psycho-oncology aims to take care of all dimensions - emotional and behavioral, interpersonal and spiritual - devastatingly overwhelmed by cancer. Psycho-oncology considers the disease in a bio-psycho-cultural perspective, placing the person at the center of the treatment. Clinical studies show how much an organic disease affects not only the biology of the body, but also the mental representation that an individual, a group or a family has and still have of themselves, their relationships and their future. This workshop focuses on the work of the group experience with a focus on the doctor-patient relationship like in BALINT GROUPS. In fact, the reaction to the discovery of cancer is much more than a simple clinical evaluation or a psychiatric classification. The impact of cancer on people's lives is linked to four main factors: The existential threat of disease; The psychosocial consequences; The consequences of the pathological process of the disease; The treatment and its effects. The application of the analytical and group-analytic method in the oncological field poses with its specificity the problem of knowing the cancer patient as it brings to the fore the disturbing nature of the relationship between doctors and patients. In fact, in oncology, the patient is unconsciously experienced as a similar/unlike of whom it is difficult to say if he still belongs to the "mass of the living" or if he has not already been insidiously marked by the "mass of the dead". In fact we can consider this clinical and existential reality as a dimension of suspension between life and death. The operator, the patient, the family members and the institutions are in a labyrinth. It is this placement of the cancer patient, suspended between the "double mass" of the living and the dead, potential newborn (in case of exit/recovery) or dying (in case of entrapment in the disease), which disorients and sometimes displaces in the relationship of both caregivers and patients. The present bio-psycho-cultural approach therefore proposes a complex reading of intervention and interpretation of the oncological disease as a psycho-anthropological system in which the systems of care, the systems of relationships, the systems of intervention considered interconnected and dialoguing are part all immersed in the representation and unconscious fantasies of all the social actors present in the clinical scenario. Both biologically and psychologically, cancer is a collective affair. In this sense, the neoplastic process follows the same paradigm as prenatal life: the group paradigm. (Ancona L. 1992). Refereces: Fornari F., (1985), Affetti e Cancro, Raffaello Cortina Editore. TOLSTOI L.(1886), La morte di Ivan Il'ic, Milano: Mondadori. KUEBLER-ROSS E., Death. The final stage of growth, New York: Simon and Schuster,1986. Nesci A. D.; Poliseno T. (1997), Metamorfosi e cancro: studi di psico-oncologia, Ed. SEU. MATTE BLANCO I., The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. An Essay in Bi-Logic, London: Duckworth, 1975 (trad.ital. Torino: Einaudi, 1975.