L’ESPERIENZA VISSUTA DELL’INCONTRO:
IL CORPO-A-CORPO

Raffaele Vanacore, Gilberto Di Petta, Danilo Tittarelli

The categorical-taxonomic model proved useful neither for the diagnosis, nor for the therapy of mental illnesses, and in particular for what is called “schizophrenia”. By contrast, what is needed is the reaffirmation of psychiatry as a clinical practice, which preserves and renews its clinical attitude in the encounter and in the exchange between human beings, and not between detached aggregates of elementary particles. In this paper we focus on the research on the intersubjective dimension of the human being, as decisive for a clinical methodology based on the lived experience of both the patient and the clinician. We then turn to therapy: indeed, it is in the intersubjective space of the therapeutic relationship that the patient’s experience can not only reveal itself, but can also acquire the possibility of an experience that is not only psychopathological. Moreover we briefly report our experience of the Dasein-group Analyse. This group approach is centred on the search for an authentic intersubjective encounter, as an embodied crucial event. Finally, the constantly new condition of possibility which emerges in the clinical encounter is the radical condition of freedom even in the most severe forms of disease, such as schizophrenia.