RISULTATI RICERCA

As an introduction to the critical subject of psychotherapy, the author briefly presents the features of the currently unfolding paradigmatic change in the field of human health. The new definition of health as a state of physical, psychological and social wellbeing invites us to fill a great void of knowledge in the domain of health, which is now identified as a positive state and no longer as the absence of disease. Although fascinating, the aim to move from the disease model to the complementary (and not alternative) health model is fraught with difficulties. While in the disease domain a broad variety of mental disorders have been investigated and classified, there is a great lack of knowledge concerning the positive dimensions of health. At variance with the disease model, the author underscores that there is no plural form of the word health in our vocabulary. After a brief description of the recent literature, the present article focuses on the intrinsic and specific connection between theory and application. Working in the area of positive health entails a process of promoting human strengths, which is quite different from that involved in fighting illness. It is, therefore, crucial for psychologists to reflect on the topic of psychotherapy and on its use in fostering health. This topic is even more exciting and complex when we pass from a continuum that goes from disease to health to a bi-dimensional view in which disease and health, rather than being viewed as static and separate dimensions, are involved in a dynamic process of interdependence.

The paper is a synthesis of results obtained through guided writing of traumatic events or situations following a technique proposed by James W. Pennebaker in the ’80s (3-4 sessions of about 20 minutes on subsequent days, following specific instructions). In the general population effects include fewer medical visits, improvement in the immune situation, improvement in academic proficiency, higher rates of reemployment, longer duration of couple relationships. In clinical populations the technique appears promising in situations where a positive outcome may be expected and where subjects may exert some influence. Possible modifications of instructions and procedures are also examined, as well as interactions with individual features of subjects involved. Finally tentative explanations of the effects of the technique are put forth, on the line of an improved cognitive/emotional processing of events and situations, and of a more general activation, with effects on subsequent events, of this processing capacity. The writing technique may be defined as a true modality for health promotion, since it can improve health state, capacities and performance also in the absence of conscious distress and of explicit help request on part of subjects.

Once described social and historical reasons that have infused to the adolescence’s creation, in opposition to biology, the author explains the group function in this age of life. The attempt to increase the structural factors of personality within the group life and the emotional self help praxis are the bases to the establishment of the self help group Eclisse. The group born in Prato, out of a medical context, during the beginning of the ninety as a project of Tuscany Region. The experience lasted almost ten years, and the author has been the organizer and the participating observer too of the group dynamics. The group Eclisse characteristics are described: free admittance, meeting frequency, users typology, ecc. Once analysed the peculiarities of the transfert relationships between the adult observer and the young users, a meeting report is proposed. Finally, a discussed analysis follows about the group interactions.

The paper reflects about the possibility of psychoanalytic intervention in the school, how we can promote the psychological and emotional wellbeing of the pupils and therefore the mental health in the evolved age and in the world of the school. For this particular psychological situation of the adolescent it is analyzed above all his dependence and how this emotive interaction with the teachers helps the delicate move of a child still supported by his parents to an independent personal development. The ways of interventions in the school are analyzed specifying that if they are done with an psychoanalytical eye they can promote psychological health . Infect in the informing years\of his identity its is very easy for a young person in difficulty to choose, even pathological, a socially definite role. In this case to identify early symptoms or give a diagnosis which indicates only a risk factors induces a stigmatism that can influence the social progress and psychological evolution, damaging the beginnings of the situation of margined. It is done the analysis of School institution and his psychological dynamics and of the activity of the teacher confronted with his mental state while teaching in class. Then there is a reflection on how to create changers in the psychological climate of the class and how to form the mind of the teachers with psychoanalytic instruments: to help the school, to effect its main educative job that is the form citizens. This can’t happen without their adequate psychological maturity.

In the article the author reflects on the emotive transferral and controtransferal emotional implications that characterizes the relationship between the general practioner with his patients. The experience is put into the point of view of favouring well-being in health and not in illness, putting an accent on the identifying the protection factors (ex. Educating emotion, promoting the ability of managing stress, experimenting empathy ecc.). The work , gives a brief description of the frame work in which this experience is born and will try the focus on how the group process starting from the reflection on his own professional role and on the representation of the difficult patient which has allowed specific emotions to emerge (angry, boredom, omnipotent) in front of the patients and how their emotions can interferer deeply in the relation of treatment. In the article pieces of session will be reported where several imagines or episodes which have taken on a particular metaphoric and symbolic weight for the group. The therapeutists had the main of stimulating circulating emotions, thoughts, and specific themes in the group.

This article discusses the work of a group that is studying the internal psychic space of pregnant women. The group, conducted by Gina Ferrara Mori and composed of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, has been working together for many years comparing each member’s professional experience in Infant Observation (according to Esther Bick’s methodology) and research on motherhood. The study group that shares the common conviction that pregnancy is a psychosomatic event, proposes to explore internal motherhood, the psychic dimension of pregnancy. The group’s main aim is to understand the maternal atmosphere that begins with pregnancy and that determines new mental experiences during pregnancy and transforms the organization of the self. The material discussed comes from different observational areas such as initial interviews with pregnant women for Infant Observation, therapy with pregnant patients, preparatory groups for mothers-to-be, observations of and monitoring during the entire pregnancy period. The group’s work confirms the importance of Monique Bydlowski’s concept of psychic transparency: a specific mental state during pregnancy in which there is a greater permeability of the unconscious and pre-conscious allowing for a more immediate access to maternal psychic functioning which includes doubts, fears, conflicts, changes and vulnerability. The observatory is not only a study group that does research; it is also a place where professional workers can become better equipped to contribute to the development of a new way to treat pregnant women in the public health service. The members of this group believe that it is important to create an appropriate atmosphere between pregnant women and health workers for both the health workers (midwives, gynecologists, pediatricians, ecographists) as well as the pregnant women especially in regard to their future relationship to the new born baby.

The author proposes a change in the point of view in looking at a psychotic patient. A change that foresees the necessity to think of the patient as a person that has within himself a healthy dimension, called by the author healthy virtuality. Badaracco underline the importance of this view in a measure in which hope is created in the patient , the hope to be understood . In fact the way of looking regards what one sees in the others. Often the family of a psychotic patient thinks that he has became mad and it is not possible to cure him. The idea that exists a healthy virtuality in the patient makes us think that the mental illness and the mental health is thought of in a different way. In this article the author suggests to abandon the concept of an internal object and to substitute it with the intra-psychic presence. These presences are real and true subjects that are inside us. According to the author the condition of illness and of health regarding what we call the presence of others inside us and in particular, with the interdependence, at the same time, that the Self has maintained , in each one of us, with these others both in the external and internal world.