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This paper considers the therapeutic issues of a prison writing group from a dual perspective: the specificities of the pathologies of behaviour and the consideration of defence mechanisms elaborated by subjects facing a most difficult situation, that is : life in prison.The therapeutic group writing aims, notably through the use of fiction, to activate the representation of thoughts or emotional states, rarely perceptible by the subject, often reflecting, in part, the psychological split in the subject’s life. It also reflects the source of the creation of unbearable and unrepresentational tensions. The focus of the therapeutic work will be to aim at the development of behaviour by resisting destructivity and, through meaning being given to the transition to action within the group, and by activating the capacity to empathize with others, in the transferential group dynamic.Finally, the group therapeutic work begins with the group’s unconscious phantasm, which appears in prison groups centred around recurrent unconscious psychic organizers, such as the opposition between strength and collapse, described by Balier, the predominance of a fantasy of a primary narcisstic renewal, accompanied by a process of exclusion of an object or the resort to the representation of catastrophic unrepresentational primitive anguish, of the order of “primitive agonies”.