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The main point of this article is the recognition that the patient doesn't create a field only with the analyst, but also with other important people, with his work place, and with some Self-Objects. The analyst may perceive how the patient's moods, feelings, and self-esteem change when entering each of these different fields. The analytic field created between the analyst and the patient is an important tool, a sort of Geiger counter, through which the analyst may detect the presence and the activity of these other fields. Isabel's brief case history illustrates a useful approach to deal with the negative effects of a very disturbing and confusing field she established with the company she worked for.

This paper will present a series of predominantly clinical observations concerning the lengthy work a patient carries out, with the help of the analyst, in order to achieve greater personal authenticity. When this work is drawing to a close and the patient has gained a degree of authenticity, this authenticity remains within him, almost without his realizing it. The power of authenticity is instead revealed through the patient's most intimate and important relationships. In the long term, the patient's authenticity also alters his perception of himself and of his role in the world. He feels more alive and less overcome by a sense of futility, if earlier this had been the case.

Freud presupposed that the group has one leader and only one. The Freudian view was that for the members of the group the group leader fills the role of the superego ideal. Bion, on the other hand, makes a distinction between ‘work-group mentality’ and ‘primitive mentality’. Each of these two mentalities at work in the group has its own corresponding leader. The head of the work group is an operative leader, a leader of thought. The head of the basic-assumption group embodies and expresses regressive, uncontrollable negative drives. This leader's individuality is peculiarly susceptible to obliteration by the basic-assumption group's leadership requirements. I have chosen to give the name of genius loci to a third figure who fosters the group members’ sense of belonging and identity, encourages participation and sharing, and manages to grasp the affective tonality of what is happening in the group. In the small analytic group the genius loci refers to a figure analogous to a leader, working with, in opposi...

SUMMARY A feature of group life, its biography, is described which derives from the history of the group and which gives a unique character to the life of the group in the present. This inheritance is important in the present functioning of the group and for the experience and development of its members.

Unlike other concepts such as 'illusion', 'capacity to tolerate frustration' and 'libidinal investment', the concept of faith has not yet found a well-defined position in psychoanalytic theory. Bion focused on faith and placed it in an unusual context: scientific work. Through the Act of Faith a researcher can give some consistency to certain ideas, hunches or intuitions that may appear during observation, though he cannot represent them by existing theory. Through the Act of Faith an analyst can 'see', 'hear' and 'feel' those mental phenomena, the reality of which leaves no practising psychoanalysts in doubt, even if they cannot represent them by current formulations. In this paper, the author aims to expand Bion's proposals into the clinical and therapeutic fields. In the first part, the author examines how faith and trust overlap, and how they depart from each other; and he gives an example. Faith possesses an igniting and driving force which trust doesn't possess to the same extent. In the second part, the author looks at F as a psychic function of the analyst, which aids him in supporting a depressed and hopeless patient while waiting for the return of the patient s desire to live. In the final part, he focuses on F from the patient point of view and studies the transformations of F that may occur during an analysis.