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Based on their experiences as researchers, the authors identify and characterize the obstacles, and even the impasses, encountered in setting up an inter-university and international research group – “an inter group” – in the field of the human sciences. They propose an analysis based on the paradigm of psychoanalysis in extension. After describing the moments that were inherent to the setting up of the research group, they define its specific organisers: the carrier duo, the interpreter and the objects of relating. They put forward the hypothesis that the group process requires the deployment of specific psychic work in three dimensions: the constitution of an “inter” group presupposes not only an elucidation of narcissistic issues – individual, group and institutional – but also the unravelling of unconscious alliances and the elaboration of cultural and institutional “incorporats”.