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.
Our group is continuing its work in research and training, as well as in publishing and other scientific interchanges. Information about our activities is available in the previous issues of this journal and on our website: funchiozza.com.
In our work we use a special method, called Pathobiographical Study, for investigating and influencing the links between unconscious emotions and somatic diseases. This method is important in our clinical practice. In the following paragraphs I will try to convey, in summary fashion, some of the grounds for the method. I also want to emphasize our experience of the emotional countertransferential tool, as an instrument in our research, in making by now over 2000 pathobiographies.
Even though we often insist that it is true that a human being is made up of millions of atoms interrelating and forming a particular structure, it is equally and fundamentally true to say that he is constituted by a set of stories which, as with a Chinese coffin, contain each other in an endless way. Neither a film, nor a pathobiography, can narrate a whole life. What they do supply are kinds of “arguments” or themes, lined up in order to give meaning, the sort of leitmotiv that we talk about when dealing with musical creations.
We could think of the pathobiographical study as a fragment of life, representing at that moment the total lived experience, in the same way as we talk of the DNA in the cells of a multicellular organism as containing the whole “idea” of that which constitutes