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.
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