The epistemological challenge of contemporary empirical research motivates the Author to explore various ways to value the function of intuition in psychotherapeutic practice, to the aim of grasping the subject’s real experience. To this purpose, he examines the different meanings of "intuition", intertwining them with a variety of validation criteria that depend on the type of accepted epistemology. In favour of participative approaches to the object, the Author states that, at the very least, the more intuition can produce truthful results, the more it is obtained in, and starting from, a "unipathic" merging - i.e., a therapist’s mainly receptive, pre-symbolic and functionally regressive attitude. "Uniphaty", which has also interesting correlates with recent discoveries of neuroscience, provides a precious data source and makes intuition different from its use in natural sciences.
Keywords: intuition, "unipathy", epistemology, psychotherapeutic practice, truth