You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Recently Staffan Lindén reviewed Benedetti, G: Den själssjuke som medmänniska in this journal. (Int. Forum Psychoanal 2, 1993). He presented Benedetti as a scientist of international reputation, as a central figure among psychotherapists working with schizophrenic persons, and he outlined his crucial statements from 1976 on. Now, in a new publication, Benedetti gives us what is perhaps his final and conclusive survey of his work. In a philosophically inspired language he expresses his essential thoughts, therapeutic insights and creative vision in psychotherapeutic treatment processes of psychically and mentally ill persons.
At the beginning of this century the psychotherapy of psychosis was initiated by Jung as well as by Federn, a scholar of Freud and the first ego-psychologist. Later on knowledge of psychotic processes was extended by investigations of “schismatic” families by Lidz and Wynne's delineation of pseudomutuality and irrationality of communication in families where psychotic persons grow up. As a consequence family-therapy was developed, but also group-psychotherapy, gestalt-therapy, behavior-therapy, hypnosis and so on. Benedetti has been working for more than forty years in the field of individual psychotherapy. He has contributed more than a hundred publications on this topic. His psychotherapeutic conception is a synthesis of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and symbolic formation and transformation of psychopathology. In this book he gives a comprehensive view of his thinking.
Benedetti first describes basic situations of psychotic suffering: the loss of identity and the delusion as a reconstruction of the self. This is connected with the distortion of symbols. The confusion of the symbols with what is symbolized results in a fusion of the ego with the world. This creates the autistic intrapsychic universe, and splits the autistic human being from us. As a psychodynamic therapist Benedetti does not have the intention to categorize fundamental facts in