This article will discuss the challenges of psychodynamic work in health care organizations, through exploring shifts around the idea of death faced in western societies-and relating them to unconscious cultures and defences erected against the fear of death and fear of annihilation in medical organizations. It will also present the vicissitudes of an inpatient group analytic group conducted in the cardiology ward of a general hospital in Brazil, and introduce discussion on the presence of a 'ghost matrix' in these traumatized, regressed and haunted settings.
This response is based on Reyna Hernández de Tubert two articles: The Mexican social unconscious—Part I: The roots of a nation’ and ‘Part II: Politics and group analysis’ (Hernández de Tubert, 2021). It discusses the role of the myth of mestization and the myth of conquest in the Mexican social unconscious in Mexican tripartite matrices. It also draws attention to Ferenczi’s trauma theory—confusion of tongues—exploring the psychoanalytic and group analytic ideas on the ‘identification with the aggressor’ in association with the concepts of introjection and incorporation.
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