Cosmo Education English

Carl A. Whitaker traces the development of his philosophy of psychotherapy through his personal history, his work with psychotic patients, co-therapy, and his gradual move toward family therapy. The episode explores some of the core elements of his thinking: the therapist’s emotional involvement, the importance of personal growth, differentiation, the relationship between insight and change, the function of the psychotherapy of absurdity, and the transformative meaning of the therapeutic relationship. An essential contribution to understanding a deeply relational, participatory, and growth-oriented view of psychotherapy.

Through Paolo Gritti’s final contribution, this episode reflects on the relationship between community mental health and psychotherapy, beginning with his experience in the Trieste services shaped by Franco Basaglia’s reform. It explores a model of care grounded in participation, shared responsibility, and the recognition of suffering within family, social, and community contexts.

The episode also examines the therapeutic value of the group, the plurality of voices, and reciprocal intersubjective recognition between patient and therapist. Particular attention is given to the therapist’s self, the role of personal and transgenerational history, the clinical meaning of the body and metaphor, and the need to preserve psychotherapy’s transformative potential within contemporary mental health services.

An in-depth analysis of the COSMO system applied to the Picture Frustration Study, a performance-based instrument for exploring responses to interpersonal frustration. The episode examines narrative coding of responses, the integration of agency and communion, and the assessment of personality functioning severity. It highlights the role of emotional regulation, implicit relational patterns, and collaborative assessment in clinical understanding and shared meaning-making.

A clinical exploration of the relationship between the individual and the family system in the psychotherapy of psychosis. Drawing on de Bernàrt’s model, the episode examines the relational function of symptoms, processes of differentiation, and the integration of individual and family treatment, with a focus on developmental dynamics in adolescence.

It further discusses the technical implications of moving between family and individual settings, the role of the therapeutic alliance, and the complexity of change processes in relationally rigid family contexts.

An in depth exploration of Gianni Consolaro’s integrated clinical intervention model in developmental age. The episode examines the relationship between diagnosis, development, family dynamics and social context, drawing on developmental psychopathology, systemic thinking and collaborative therapeutic assessment. A clinical and theoretical contribution to understanding the complexity of childhood psychological suffering and guiding therapeutic work with children and families within a multidimensional framework.

n this episode of Cosmo Education, we address the theme of diagnosis in clinical psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy, questioning its theoretical meaning and clinical usefulness. Drawing on the work of Vittorio Lingiardi, we explore the contribution of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual and the Shedler Westen Assessment Procedure as tools capable of restoring complexity, depth, and meaning to the assessment of personality functioning, overcoming the limits of purely categorical diagnostic models. The episode brings clinical observation and empirical research into dialogue, focusing on the value of case formulation, the integration of dimensional and categorical diagnosis, and the importance of considering not only dysfunctional aspects, but also the patient’s resources and potential within therapeutic work.

A clinical and theoretical exploration of mentalization as a core function of personality functioning and borderline personality disorder. The episode examines the development of mentalizing capacity, its implicit and explicit, cognitive and affective dimensions, and patterns of collapse under high emotional arousal. Clinical implications for affect regulation, identity, relational dynamics, and the therapeutic relationship are discussed.

In this episode of Cosmo Education, Alberto Eiguer’s conception of family therapy as a transferential process is examined in depth. Transference is explored as a field phenomenon emerging from the family as a group subject, while countertransference is treated as a central clinical tool for understanding unconscious bond organization. Particular attention is given to the therapeutic frame as a necessary condition for transforming emotional experience into thought and symbolization, especially in complex and high-risk clinical situations.

In this Cosmo Education episode, drawing on the work of Gaetano De Leo and Dino Mazzei, violence is approached not as an isolated event or a structureless outburst, but as an action organized in systemic form. The analysis focuses on redundancies in action, on the construction of action boundaries, and on the way aims, cognitions, and social meanings intertwine within the scene and across broader contexts. The clinical case discussed illustrates how violent action can become centralized around communicative paradoxes, and how family history, groups of belonging, and systems of social control contribute to stabilizing or rigidifying the relational codes that sustain the enactment.

In this episode, we revisit Alex Caldwell’s influential contribution on the clinical meaning of the MMPI-2 scales. Rather than treating scale elevations as mere indicators of pathology, Caldwell offers an interpretive framework that understands them as adaptive responses to fundamental psychological threats. Each scale is explored as a strategy of emotional survival, shaped by experiences of bodily danger, loss, pain, relational deprivation, coercion, shock, identity invalidation, and devaluation. This perspective remains highly relevant today, as it allows clinicians to move beyond descriptive assessment and recover the internal logic, coherence, and protective function of patients’ psychological responses.