Jaime Ondarza Linares
Group analysis according to Jaime Ondarza Linares: the coherence between innovation and rigor in theory and clinic.
Jamie Linares’s was born January 29th 1930, in Bogotà Columbia and died December 23rd 2022 Rome Italy.
From 1967 to 1971, Jaime Ondarza Linares led a group analysis group of psychiatrists and psychologists who attended the Clinic of Nervous and Mental Diseases of the State University of Rome, a reference point for psychiatric patients in and around Rome.
Starting from that pioneering experience of group psychotherapy, one of the three in Italy in the second half of the 1960s, Ondarza Linares continued with tenacity the diffusion of group-analytic through conferences, seminars and publications and on 31 March 1979 he established the “Group Therapeutic Analysis Center” (C.A.T.G.).”.
His commitment to disseminating group analytic theory continued first in Mental Health Centers and private nursing homes in Rome and the Province, then in the Universities of Ancona, Messina, L’Aquila and Bologna. In the Marches, in particular, training courses began which brought Group Analysis to be established in public and private institutions.
In the meantime, in the 1970s, training also continued in Rome in Via della Consulta first and in Via Mario Musco later: it was then that I met Jaime, first as a student of the newborn Psychology Degree Course then, once graduated, alongside him as an observer in clinical groups and colleagues in training
At a national level, Ondarza Linares contributed to the establishment of the Confederation of Italian Organizations for Analytical Research on Groups (C.O.I.R.A.G.) and to the recognition of training in Group Analysis precisely when the training process of individual and group psychotherapy was being formalized in Italy.
Among the merits of Ondarza Linares is having kept alive the link between Italian and international group analysis as a speaker on the occasion of international group analysis events.
At the same time, he organised in Rome the Commemoration of S.H. Foulkes on the centenary of his death; in 2005 the Study Days of the European Group Analytic Training Institutions Network (E.G.A.T.I.N.), of which he was a Founding Member; in 2009 the XVII Congress of the International Association of Group Psychotherapy (I.A.G.P.).
While continuing his commitment to the dissemination of group analytic theory, Ondarza Linares never ceased to be a clinician capable of combining orthodoxy with innovation since 1968, the year of his arrival in Italy from London where he had trained at the Maudsley Institute and Bethlem Hospital in Tyson West II, a division specifically dedicated to group psychotherapy directed by Bob Hobson.
For over thirty years, Ondarza Linares has emphasized the specificity of the setting and the group-analytic methodology and its perspectives within Foulkesian thought. This did not prevent him from giving his original contribution to the development of Group Analysis which can be found in the Group Psychotherapies Chapter of the Italian Treaty of Psychiatry, by Pancheri and Cassano (1999).
He should also be remembered for the articles published in national and international journals that have enriched the national and international debate and as editor and animator for over fifteen years of the column “Plexus … the space of the group” in the journal Actuality in Psychology. He became one of the major interpreters of the diffusion of group analysis among psychologists and psychotherapists of many generations and different affiliations and theoretical orientations.
In “The Social Unconscious. The group-analytic perspective” (2009), Ondarza Linares reiterates the epistemological novelty of Foulkes’ group-analytic thought and expresses his original vision of the relationship between the individual and social mind: in the group-analytic methodological-clinical perspective, the importance is given by the use of identification and identity that permeate the process of any group and from the exploration of the interconnections existing between the individual self and the social self.
However, now we just have to take note that Jaime has left us. I use ‘leave’ to express the loss felt by those who knew and appreciated him but also for the value of his legacy, consisting of the rigor in dealing with theory always validated by clinical practice and attention to comparison.
The hope is that, as Psychotherapists, we know how to treasure it.
Marina Brinchi
Ondarza Linares J. (1999) Psicoterapie di gruppo. In Trattato Italiano di Psichiatria, vol. III. Milano: Masson.
Ondarza Linares J. (2009). L’Inconscio Sociale. La prospettiva gruppoanalitica. Roma: EUR.
Foulkes S. H. (1967). Analisi terapeutica di gruppo. Torino: Boringhieri.