2022/2023

2022/2023

DM270

M-PSI/08 (CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY)

DEPARTMENT OF BRAIN AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

PSYCHOLOGY

PERCORSO COMUNE

1°

1st semester (26/09/2022 - 13/01/2023)

9

54 lesson hours

Italian

ORAL TEST

LICCIONE DAVIDE (titolare) - 9 ECTS

The student must have basic knowledge of psychopathology, general psychology and neuropsychology

The course offers to the students an overview of the family of cognitivist-oriented psychotherapies, specifying the ontology of the human being considered from each of these and the resulting clinical-application theories. Particular attention will be paid to the comparison between standard cognitivist approaches, characterized by a rational-linear vision of the human being (eg: REBT, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) protocol, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy), and current cognitive-neuropsychological approaches, based on a complex and historical vision of the person. With reference to the latter, the different developmental paths of the Self will be made clear with different clinical examples, both in "typicality" and in the main psychopathological conditions. Finally, some psychotherapeutic clinical strategies will be shown and discussed, also through simulations and visions of clinical cases.

The course is divided into three main didactic modules, respectively the philosophical, psychological-neuroscientific and clinical-applicative modules.
The philosophical module aims to offer the student a critical-constructive vision about the different visions of human existence and scientific knowledge that precede the development of the main psychotherapeutic models. This didactic module allows the student to understand the limits of psychotherapeutic models that adopt the method of natural science, in an uncritical way, to understand the person and his ways of being (for example, treating the person as if he were a "linear-rational machine" or reducing it to the "organism that biology describes"). But it is also thanks to this module that the student understands the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue between the different sciences (human and natural), which on the one hand prevents from reducing human existence to only biological functioning (reductivist materialism), on the other hand it allows constructive use of the incessant research innovations that come from the natural sciences, dealing with man (human genetics, biological psychiatry, neuroscience, etc.).









The psychological-neuroscientific theoretical module offers the student a historical profile and a thematic study of the current panorama of cognitive psychotherapies. Starting from the ontological clarification about the human essence and personal identity achieved in the previous didactic module of the philosophical area, the typical and atypical (pathological) development paths of the Self are explored. Each theme is treated according to an interdisciplinary approach, which means in concordances of the human sciences with the biological and neuroscientific ones. This module allows students to understand the theoretical and applicative limits of psychotherapies that reduce the person to only cognitive-reflexive processes and / or those who want to understand the human being in the light of organismic functioning alone. Consequently, this didactic module allows the student to appreciate the theoretical and clinical-applicative evolutions of those psychological models that have, as their object of study, the individual in his or her experiential and narrative ways of being, and which adopt a highly interdisciplinary explicative methodology.






In the light of the conceptual considerations and empirical evidence presented in the two previous modules, the clinical-applicative module offers students the opportunity to understand the human being in his typical and atypical developmental paths, with particular reference to pathological experiential modes and strategies of psychotherapeutic intervention. From the setting of the first interview to the explanation of the psychotherapeutic strategies, the student is going to be described the complex and interdisciplinary theoretical and applicative framework of neuropsychological cognitive psychotherapy. There are several simulations of clinical interviews in the classroom and the viewing of video-recorded psychotherapeutic interviews (these clinical interviews will be viewed and discussed in the course of specific seminars coordinated by expert psychotherapists).




1) PHILOSOPHICAL AREA
a. The philosophical and epistemological basis of standard cognitive psychotherapy: the subject and the processes of knowledge according to the rationalist approach from the Cartesian cogito to the Kantian subject.


b. The epistemological bases of constructivist cognitive psychotherapy: Husserl's phenomenology, Heinz Von Foerster's second cybernetics, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's biology of knowledge, Vittorio Guidano and Mike Mahoney's post-rationalist psychotherapy.



c. The philosophical and epistemological bases of cognitive-neuropsychological psychotherapy: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Nancy, Levinas, Ricoeur, Severino.


2) THEORETICAL AREA

a. The human being as a "Who?" and as a "What?".
b. “The human “What?””: The limits of cognitive models and the problem of categorization.
c. The theoretical and applicative fragility of the so-called "therapeutic protocols" and the problem of their empirical validation.
d. The constructivist deviation and its overcoming.
e. Psychology as a science of "situated and thematized experience".
f. "Explaining" and "understanding" as complementary modes of human knowledge.
g. From action to language according to neuroscience and hermeneutic phenomenology.
h. The theme of personal identity and psychopathology.
i. Emotions and feelings according to phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology: concordances and criticalities.
j. The development of the Self
k. The neuropsychopathological arc
L. The therapeutic pact





3) CLINICAL-APPLICATION AREA
a. The diagnosis
b. The first interview in psychotherapy
c. Examples of psychotherapeutic strategies in different disorders
d. Classroom simulations
e. Clinical cases commented.

Frontal lessons, group simulations, discussion groups. Clinical-application seminars are planned in small groups with discussion of videotaped clinical cases.

To be studied

Liccione D. (2019). Psicoterapia Cognitiva Neuropsicologica. II Edizione ampliata e riveduta. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino.

Liccione D. (2012). (A cura di). Casi Clinici in Psicoterapia Cognitiva Neuropsicologica. LibreriaUniversitaria Editore: Padova.

One Text to be read and learned:

AREA FENOMENOLOGIA DELLE SINDROMI PSICOTICHE
Fuchs, T. (2015) The intersubjectivity of delusions. World Psychiatry, 14(2), 178-179.

Fuchs, T. (2015) Pathologies of Intersubjectivity in Autism and Schizophrenia. Journal of Consciousness Studies 22(1–2), 191-214.

Nordgaard, J., and Parnas, J. (2014). Self-disorders and the schizophrenia spectrum: a study of 100 first hospital admissions. Schizophr. Bull. 40, 1300–1307.

Sass, L. A., and Parnas, J. (2003). Schizophrenia, consciousness and the self. Schizophr. Bull. 29, 427–444.

BASIC RESEARCH FIELD WITH CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS

Costa V., Liccione D., Vanzago L. (a cura di) (2021). Il mondo estraneo. Fenomenologia e clinica della perdita di Evidenza Naturale. Editore SCHOLÉ. Brescia.

Messas, G., & Fulford, B. (2021). Three dialectics of disorder: refocusing phenomenology for 21st century psychiatry. The lancet. Psychiatry, 8(10), 855–857. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00357-6

Liccione, D., Moruzzi, S., Rossi, F., Manganaro, A., Porta, M., Nugrahaningsih, N., Allegri, N. (2014). Familiarity is not notoriety: phenomenological accounts of face recognition. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 10.

Niedenthal M. P.(2007). Embodying emotion. Science. Vol 316 p.1002-1005.

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY FIELD WITH CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS


Nelson, K. (2006). Narratives from the Crib, Harvard University Press.
Miller, A. B., Machlin, L., McLaughlin, K. A., & Sheridan, M. A. (2021). Deprivation and psychopathology in the Fragile Families Study: A 15-year longitudinal investigation. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 62(4), 382–391.

Reddy V. (2019). Meeting infant affect. Developmental psychology, 55(9), 2020–2024.

RESEARCH AREA ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY

Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R.E., Stockmann, T. et al. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AREA OF EATING DISORDERS IN THE LIGHT OF BASIC RESEARCH (EXAMPLES ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC AND NON-SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES)
Fuchs T. (2022). The disappearing body: anorexia as a conflict of embodiment. Eating and weight disorders : EWD, 27(1), 109–117. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40519-021-01122-7

Probst, M., Vandereycken, W., Vanderlinden, J. & Van Coppenolle, H. (1998). The significance of body size estimation in eating disorder: Its Relationship with Clinical. and Psychological Variables. The International journal of eating disorders. vol. 24, n.2, pp. 167-174.

CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT SOME "EVIDENCE BASED" TECHNIQUES IN PSYCHOTHERAPY
Shedler J. (2018). Where Is the Evidence for "Evidence-Based" Therapy?. The Psychiatric clinics of North America, 41(2), 319–329.

Purser R.E. (2019). McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater Books: London.

Purser R.E. (2019). McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater Books: London.

Individual interview. The student must have understood the fundamental concepts of the history of cognitive psychotherapy with specific reference to its current evolution in neuropsychological cognitive psychotherapy

The text of your choice, if not included among those listed, can also be agreed with the student