Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Psychotic Patients: Relevance of Dreams and of the Emerging of the Human Potential

Psychotic patients can be treated with psychodynamic psychotherapy. Instead of the severity of the illness/symptoms the possibility to start the therapeutic work is related to the unconscious skills of the patient. These are... [ view full abstract ]

Psychotic patients can be treated with psychodynamic psychotherapy. Instead of the severity of the illness/symptoms the possibility to start the therapeutic work is related to the unconscious skills of the patient. These are represented by dreams’ contents at the most. The methodology presented looks for the valid parts that remained untouched since childhood and that are not always showed inside the therapeutic relationship. The baby is born sane with a spontaneous specie-specific affective activity (physiological) with the environment. The main relationships (parents first) that don’t allow the development of the Human Potential (Battuello and Errico, 2015) of the child force him to start anti-physiological processes such as introjection, identification etc. These mechanisms could be at the bottom of the building of psychopathology in the adulthood. But also in psychotic patients, if the dream can let emerge images of unconscious traces of valid, not fragmented, saved and protected parts is always possible to go through an active psychodynamic work intended as interpretation of dreams to transform the psychopathology with the aim of treatment more than support. The approach to dreams’ content is also important for the dynamic diagnosis: the clinical experience teaches that many times the symptoms that insert the patient in a categorical frame are not enough to understand what is really happening in a patient. The consequence is that patients are bared from the possibility of a psychotherapeutic work and undergo psychiatric or supportive treatments. Clinical examples, mostly dreams, are presented.