The destructive work of the figure of "thanathoforo" and its involvment in the collapse of the institutional holder. The look of a pedagogical supervision within a community for children

By this paper I would like to explore some passages of a consulting experience defined as "impossible." The impossibility to help an organization to change and solve the discomforts that afflict its members is often understood afterwards: it is not a matter of the resistance to the change that the systems and the people involved offer when a consultant enters an organization and foresees new shapes of the system, but a resistance that has gone into the device to the root, such that the system survives only if no gear is touched. These are places where the same action of thinking is strongly opposed) because the action of thought itself produces a shake of the institutional holder which, although it could appear rigid and waterproof, it would crumble showing its inconsistency and inability to hold. These are places where the suffering of those who live inside is required to maintain the life of the system, where the discomfort is so widespread but also so well cushioned that any movement towards a possibility of change is avoided. Like an unmanageable patient, social services too show sometimes their compromised face, their area of impenetrability against which any attempt to take care of them is destined to fail. Starting from the reading of the "institutional field" (Baranger 0.1961 to 1962; Correale, 1999), of the transpersonal dynamics of the institution (Diet, 1996) and of the phenomena relating to the '"area of the syncretic sociality" (Bleger 1967 ), this paper intends to analyze the process investing the figure of the thanathoforo (the bringer of death), a function that can divert the institution toward deadly drifts. When Diet talks about the thanathoforo he refers to a person who puts his pathology at the disposal of the institution in order to attack the living, thinking and processing functions; he is a very charismatic person who, focusing the attention on the destructive side of his reasoning and of his intention, seduces and paralyzes the group to which he belongs; he puts out of action its internal dynamism and forces it to surrender before any attempt of change. On a psychological level, the thanatoforo produces in a group an experience of annihilation that razes all forms of life and that generates a distressing effect of powerlessness and helplessness. He embodies the form of a persecutor who crystallizes the relationship with the group according to a sado-masochistic tune. It is interesting to note how this figure does not outline so much a single individual as a “ foric function” (Blacks, 2004), which may pass from one operator to another in the same service, and which aims to destroy any form of change in the bud because its balance is preserved and is based on the destruction of all ties, on discrediting enemy people, denouncing and cultivating a state of uncertainty, instability and disequilibrium where fears can be nourished and deftly manipulated. Moreover, I shall refer to a few passages of my professional biography of pedagogical supervisor, in a community for children where this figure acted predominantly and I will analyze thoroughly the ways in which this destructive drift of its internal culture expressed itself, starting from its relationships with an organization who lacked to exercise its function of holding and from a narcissistic leadership style that did not protect enough the rights of its employees and did not provide them appropriate recognition.Finally, I will describe the effects that this process produced on the internal life of this service, on the behavior and quality of life of the residents and I will try to explain the repercussions on the educational project that was subject to strong impasses, with noticeable effects on the well-being of the working teams and on the experience of the guest-children