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The practice of small psychoanalytic groups with very young children with severe psychopathological disturbances raises questions as to its pertinence just as much as it questions the theory. It is confronted both with the treatment of an internal psychic groupality constituted at a stage that at best is embryonic and with forms of extreme desymbolisation. But these groups constitute a privileged terrain for observing the first modalities of the self-initiation of thought-processes in relations with the other. The author proposes, to situate his reflections epistemologically on these practices at the crossroads of several models and to clarify the organising axes of the associative process. If it is essentially a clinical practice “to (internal) limits”, it is also situated “at the limits” of theorisation, questioning, in particular, the classical opposition between the intrapsychic and the interpsychic with regard to their progressive differentiation and their reciprocal influences.