Psychological Perspectives on Psychiatry for the Person

Human individual psychological development emerges in interaction with other persons, beginning with the infant-mother relationship and continuing with significant others in the environment nurturing the baby. A gradual developmental process culminates in two critical separation-individuation phases - the first one in early childhood and the other during adolescence – and leads to increasing independence of the subject and more mature relationships with other persons. From a psychological perspective, person centred psychiatry has then to consider both the intra-subjective and the inter-subjective aspects of clinical situations when failure in the developmental process leads to severe psychopathological disorders. In line with a contextualized definition of the person (“I am I and my circumstance”), person centred psychological approaches will have to focus both on the individual experience of the patient, including his subjectivity, and his experience involving the family and the social environment.