In order to present an orderly, organic discussion of our topic we must first delimit the concept of severe pathology. This concept has the important advantage of evoking a broad, global field of reference, thus avoiding the risk posed by objectifying, reductive nosological categories, but also the disadvantage of privileging the symptomatic aspect - the severity - over other parameters, such as relational capacity, the organization of the self, the global state of internal objects, and so on.

We have considered it useful for the purposes of our study, which is inspired by a psychoanalytic perspective, to conceive quite generically as severe all those cases that involve a serious