Before Pines, group analytic practitioners had emphasized the concept of cohesion as the main force in keeping the group together and, as such, a crucial therapeutic factor. Pines examined the concept of coherency in psychoanalysis as a key element in healthy human development. He innovatively applied to group analysis this concept of coherency as an organizing principle that enables higher levels of functioning, in contrast to the more primitive and undifferentiated group formations that are based on cohesion. The article uses clinical material from the author’s work to illustrate Pines’ ideas. The author made a clinical mistake, but he was able to reflect on and learn from his mistake. In turn, this therapeutic process enabled him to influence the group’s complex modus operandi: from one of cohesion to one of coherency.

Orthodox psychoanalysis offered the view that mental processes in the elderly are too rigidly established for favourable treatment results. Group psychotherapy with the elderly in general has received little attention, mostly concentrating on inpatient groups. The main focus has been on supportive techniques, often in institutional settings. Two of the authors (Maria Canete and Fiona Stormont) co‐conducted a weekly slow‐open analytic group for elderly people, in a London outpatient NHS clinic. This paper presents clinical material that illustrates some age‐specific issues, as they appear in the group process. For example, issues of competitiveness, rivalry and aggression, which are generally present in the beginning of groups with younger people, tend to be absent, or manifest themselves differently, in the elderly group. Denial of age becomes impossible, which helps these patients to accept approaching death and the process of dying itself. Psychoanalytic group psychotherapy can be especially indicated for this age population.

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This article tries to make sense of Brexit, or otherwise, from a group attachment perspective. It provides a historical analysis of the fluctuating and highly ambivalent relationship of the United Kingdom (UK) with the European Union (EU), so far the most ambitious supranational and transnational group project in the world. But the EU has failed to keep up with some of its founding principles of openness, solidarity and compassion, in the handling of immigration—which has been the most determinant factor in the Brexit vote of June 2016, against a background of financial and migratory crises, as well as unacceptable inequality, nostalgia of sovereign British Empire and rise of English nationalism. The article aims to engage the reader to explore with the author some of the complexity of Brexit thinking and feeling, in the context of a developing EU.

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