Ugazio - Semantic polarities and psychopathologies in the family: permitted and forbidden stories

Ideas grow from encounters. And the ideas of a psychotherapist first arise through interaction with patients. I thank them before all others for the extraordinary professional and human experience I have had with them and for the trust they have put in me. I am also grateful to them because almost all have allowed me to record the whole therapy and have taken part in the follow-up, sometimes even several years after the end of their therapy experience. Thanks to their generosity, the European Institute of Family Therapy in Milan, where I carry out my clinical activity, now has an archive of more than 10,000 video-recorded psychotherapy sessions of mine from which I have taken the 220 psychotherapies on which I have based my model. They are family, couple and individual psychotherapies, chosen due to the presence of phobic, obsessive, eating or severe mood disorders in the family. At the moment when the therapy began, these 220 patients showed prototypical patterns of one of the four psychopathologies mentioned and there were no diagnostic doubts nor could additional diagnoses of other psychopathological disorders be formulated. They have been chosen for this, and this alone.

Three people with whom I have had direct contact have been of crucial influence in my intellectual development and in the elaboration of the psychopathological model which I present in this book. First of all, Mara Selvini Palazzoli. I was barely twenty when I first met her, and I wasn't at all sure that psychotherapy was the right thing for me. Listening to her lectures in Milan I felt the joy I feel when I finally discover something that engages me unreservedly. Many years have passed since then but my therapeutic and scientific interests remain substantially in keeping with the horizon that Mara Selvini Palazzoli initially opened up for me, even though I was very soon to find my own directions (in keeping with my character). I am grateful to Mara Selvini Palazzoli, for it is also through her teaching that I have continued to work with undiminished passion.

When I met Vittorio Guidano, I had already developed an interest in the semantic aspects of communication, and in the conversational processes through which family members build up their own subjectivity. At the end of 1986 a mutual friend organized a meeting between the two of us at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council) in Rome. The meeting was to prove very important: From that time on, the psychopathological model elaborated by Guidano was to become a fundamental point of reference for me. Moving beyond the black box model, which was then characteristic of the Milan Approach, had opened up for me the problem of subjectivity, but I lacked the instruments and concepts that would enable me to analyze the subjective experience. Psychoanalysis, which was custodian of the inner world, could not be the point of comparison, especially at that time. For those like me who were looking at it from the outside, it still seemed to be based firmly on assumptions that I could not share. Guidano's model, which I still regard as one of the most interesting proposals for interpretation developed outside psychoanalysis, fitted much better with my own point of view.

When I met Alessandro Biral in 1991 I had lost interest in the philosophical and political debate for some time. I couldn't seem to find any handles in that debate that would help me to understand the changes that I felt both within and around me. His courageous and striking article, Per una storia della sovranit, left a profound impression on me. It made me consider new and disquieting hypotheses, pose questions about points of view that I hadn't thought I needed to be concerned about, and pushed my research in unexpected directions. A result of these explorations was also the discovery of Louis Dumont; I did not have the chance to know him personally but he had a great influence on me. When I discuss the cultural premises underlying the psychopathologies examined, one can hear the echo of this influence.