RISULTATI RICERCA

The Genogram Method, elaborated and tested by the author and then by its collaborators, permits to look at the genogram as a real therapeutic expedient, an evolutive instrument, a sort of graphical process verifiable on a temporal axis. As the Genogram is drawn by the patient at the beginning and at the end of the therapeutic process, it is at the same time a State of Art Test, that talks about the interior family and spokes at the Therapist about the relational dynamics within it, and a Test to Evaluate Change in Psychotherapy, that enters on the therapy as an instrument of awareness of therapeuthic change realised. The passages of the entire process are: Translation, Comparison, Reading, and Interpretation.

In these last years, the fast increase of immigrants has caused considerable social changes in our Country. This work is going to describe the situation of other culture families living in Italy, taking into consideration the cultural differences and resemblances, the problems these families have met with and the expedients they have resorted to, during the integration process. In particular, this work is about the possible difficulties that a family therapist might meet with during the treatment of an immigrant family; then, it points out the therapist values that could interfere with the therapeutic process and shows the resources to develop.

Usually psychology is utilized to explain arts. The authors in this paper utilize arts to make us more close to Carl A. Whitaker family psychotherapist. His style of symbolic experiential psychotherapy and his way of making a psychotherapeutic intervention is always a creative way, more similar to a work of art. He gets directly to the family using an indirect metaphorical, allusive, symbolical and humoristic language. He disrupts the family and patient mind fixity to open new scenery in order to increase their creativity, thus allowing and facilitating changes. The psychotherapy room becomes then a magic place as many patients and fascinated, lucky psychotherapists, who had the opportunity of working with him, used to say.

The resilience, the ability to withstand and rebound from adversity, is a concept that in the last years is playing an important role in the study of family processes. In this paper, families that include a member with a severe psychopathology like schizophrenia and show a good functioning have been compared with normal ones. Some characteristics of families with a schizophrenic member who affected positively the course of that disorder were found surprisingly similar to the ones of normal families that show more healthy processes. The study of these analogies could help to better understand the family functioning, to evaluate the weight of the family in the course of psychiatric disorders and medical diseases, and to plan effective treatments.