Clinical psychology today, between theory and practice, training and research: a brief contribution to an open debate

Abstract

In this article we would like to propose some points contributing to a reflection on the fundamental characteristics of Clinical Psychology and to participate in the debate, never resolved, on the essential dimensions of the training necessary for its practice.
The boundaries which define the framework of our discussion on certain aspects of the fundamentals of Clinical Psychology can be synthesized by the following points:

• The key reference to the importance of personal experience and subjectivity in clinical practice, on both the part of the patient and the part of the psychologist; the related concepts of specificity, recognition and encounter of specificities;
• The undeniable importance of the clinician’s person, and the real relational matrix peculiar both of the evaluation situation and treatment;
• The developmental perspective which animates clinical comprehension and subsequent intervention (comprehension which understands patients starting from their history and which aims to favour their development, without reducing the treatment to a mere “cancellation of symptoms”);
• A perspective on psychopathology which is not reduced to behavioural and symptomatic manifestations (though implying them), and which regards the essential themes of personal existence and the impossibility, for the individual, of constructing self-accomplishment in interpersonal relationships and in the different domains of his/her personal development, each of them with its own specific aims and needs; -
• A conception of aetiology which keeps account of the context of the attachment relationships in the patient’s developmental background.