A Register of Psychotherapists

[Italian regulations for a mandatory register for psychotherapists on the basis of the law Ossicini.

The law 56/89 known as Ossicini was passed by the Italian Parliament on 18 February 1989. The first version of this law had been presented to Parliament for the first time in .]

This paper aims to improve understanding and exchanging at an European level and to clarify the present and future situation of psychotherapists' registration in Italy.

The task of clarifying this particularly intricate connection of Chinese boxes worries me since, after having all my psychiatric and psychotherapy training in London, I have been practising and teaching psychotherapy in my home town of Bologna for the last two years. The Chinese boxes I am thinking of are: Italy, Italian medicine, Italian psychology in general, clinical, social psychology and psychotherapy in particular. The latter is principally divided into two areas: various psychoanalytic strands (I am including Lacanians and Jungians amongst them) on one side, and systemic family therapy approaches (Palazzoli-Selvini) on the other. Cognitive, behavioural and other therapies including group therapies are underdeveloped outside the main centres of Milano and Rome.

As has happened in the United States psychodynamic thinking and vocabulary have acquired in Italy a wide cultural appeal and permeated everyday thinking and discourse to an extent which I find weird. It is generally seen as the opposition of the social psychiatry reform movement led by the late Basaglia which has lost support in professional and political quarters.

What I observe regrettably confirms the statement of Moscovici: ‘Psychoanalysis has become a sort of key, utilized by everybody to open all keys of individual, social and political existence’ (Moscovici 1976, p. 177, my translation). This may have happened so quickly here because other reference and belief systems (both religious and political) have suddenly collapsed. In the private sector wild psychotherap