L’esperienza della psicosi

We consider very important to remember here and now the creative approach to the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of psychosis of our master and founder Gaetano Benedetti. So, we are re-presenting this interview-dialogue by Patrick Faugeras, just published in La parola come cura. La psicoterapia della psicosi nell’incontro con Gaetano Benedetti, edited by A.S.P. (Psicoterapie, FrancoAngeli, Milan, 2006). In Benedetti’s view, the psychotherapic relationship shows how inner and external reality are confused in the psychotic world, where symbiosis and splitting empower each other. The splitting functioning as a defence (splitting between Ego and Super-ego, between Ego and Es, between subject and object, between the symbiotic Self and the separated Self ) is one of the core early concepts in Benedetti’s theory, and will bring him to the concepts of “Symbiotic Self” and "Separated Self". If the psychotic psychopathology limits and divides, a patient-centered psychotherapy gathers and enlarges: so, the Author can introduce his new concept of "progressive psychopathology". We can recognize the role of transference and counter-transference, interpretation and structural change in the psychotherapy with psychotic patients in different forms and by different technical means if compared with the neurotic patients’standard analysis. This psychoanalytic psychoterapeutical model let us organize our inner experience with the patient in order to make it acceptable to ourselves and to other clinicians, so transforming an apparently impossibile and confusing meeting of two so different minds into a human existential and meaningfull encounter.

Keywords: Psychosis, schizofrenia, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, simbiosi, splitting, progressive psychopathology, symbolization, projective identification.

Gaetano Benedetti, Patrick Faugeras, L’esperienza della psicosi in "SETTING" 41-42/2016, pp 5-71, DOI: 10.3280/SET2016-041001