Scientific research in analysis is aimed at the psychic events of the researcher himself, in his relations with others and in particular in the relationship with the carrier of the psychic disease. A survey from the outside on the psychic events of another person is mediated both by the tools used and by the psychic state of the researcher.The study and the interpretation of transference and of countertransference in fact reveal that the patient transmits empathetically the emotional elements which disturb him, that is to say all that which he subjects to censorship through anaesthesia of feeling (see below). The scientific training of the researcher is the same as the psychologist analyst, and follows through the following practical levels.
The first step is learning to use one's own emotional sensitivity to distinguish one's own thoughts and emotions and moods from external ones, both in sane and disturbed people. At this level we learn to know the difference between rational perception and that based on feeling, encouraging listening to one's own emotional states, according to the person one is relating to, in individual and group situations.
The emotional experience gained in relationships, are moods which originally are normal, but whose extent and investment varies deeply according to the person transmitting them. Hence the need to analyse the content, to be able to recognize the exact nature and the subsequent meaning, and finally to identify its origin, whether the researcher himself, and or other.
The material is collected through empathetic communication coming from the disturbed person, by induction, just as happens with magnetic inductions; communication is immediate, in other words it doesn't pass through any mediator - structured thought, drawing, word, sound - and requires an interpretation, a transcription which is as close as possible to the original meaning of the language code, to make it effectively usable within the psychoanalytic sessions.
The picture of the pathological situation presents several facets, which are collected with greater richness of detail by a number of operators, present in silence in the same session of analysis, where they note their own experience, on which it will be possible to work subsequently.
In the treatment of complex situations, where a number of disturbed people exist in the same situation (family, community, workplace), the incompatibility, or rather the impossibility of having relations between psychoanalysts working on the analysis of people who are in constant contact, is overcome through participation in other sessions and comparison of inductions gathered.
Evolution of the approach at the problem at the different levels is the result of the last thirty two years of operational scientific research, and experimentation in the field, since when I discovered, in 1965, the basic characters, distinctive of the cause and the nature of the psychic disease.
The first problem of research is that of diagnosis, of recognizing the state of psychic pathology. To succeed in adequately collecting psychotic symptomology, specific training in empathetic listening is required. As we know in fact the disturbance is manifest predominantly through the communication of feelings.
The first impact with the disturbed person is therefore seen in the impossibility of a true emotional exchange. This means that in the psychotic's interlocutor, emotions are magnified, in that he is able to receive inductions from the disturbed person.
But since the latter is practically impermeable to the communicative emotions of others, only rigorous training makes it possible to take a distance from the wave of emotions which overwhelm the interlocutor, and to succeed in interpreting in them what the psychotic wants to communicate.
It must not be forgotten that the person is ill, and like all ill people, he behaves like a perfect egoist. He wants to be at the centre of attention, and to achieve this, is prepared to do anything: to pretend, to blackmail, to seduce, to exploit the weak points of others without scruple. And he is not in the least able to worry about others, and even less to help the interlocutor understand the true motives for his disturbance. Faced with the ill person, it is possible to feel great emotion, the need to cry, total torment (in fact this "torment" is felt only with the psychotic person). But there is no response: on the other side there is a wall, although it may be accompanied at least initially by a certain politeness. There can be dialogue, sometimes very sharp on an intellectual level, but always with little or no empathy. One can even feel good with a psychically disturbed person, but how? In a sort of glass bell, a padded space where external stimuli arrive in muted form. There is no ability to question oneself. There is absolutely no readiness to accept change around one.
And he also does not agree to change: to protect himself he produces and induces in the others around him a "psychotic block", a sort of inability, or impotence to change, accompanied by violent anger (repressed, and which therefore passes to those around causing discord, arguments, conflicts which are as ridiculous as they are unmotivated); the sufferer would like to change his life, but never finds the right moment to get moving.
In the survival structure known as "autism", this inability to change is seen physically very clearly: the person is practically enclosed in a world of their own, into which it is extremely difficult to enter, and from which the patient never exits.
To have an idea of what the "psychotic block" means, we can refer to the condition of war, where everything seems to move, but where in reality life, apart from being constantly under threat, is at a complete standstill. A powerful picture of psychotic block is given by Luis Bundle in the film "The Exterminating Angel" where a group of friends, together at dinner after the theatre, no longer manages to leave a room, which moreover has no doors. And from the outside, the rescuers (army included!) do not succeed in breaking down that invisible wall that keeps them isolated.
Everything, in the film and in reality, happens mostly in a context of apparent normality. It is fairly clear that the effort which the mentally ill person puts into trying to survive is also translated into an attempt to give oneself at least an appearance of normality.
It is up to the healthy person to interpret the call for help from behind the facade which always appears, and always in final, emergency terms, even (or rather, especially) when things have been going on in the same way for years, so that one day more or one day less, nothing much would really change. But the haste to intervene which is felt with a disturbed person is always accompanied by a spasmodic urgency, in contrast with anaffectivity, and extreme indifference, compensated by the sharpening of rational faculties, and giving rise to typical phenomena like "smartness", used unscrupulously .
Laughing and crying are asynchronous, they have no proper timing, but occur either too much or too little or out of place, in relation to their cause; this can sometimes be appealing. But we also speak of hysterical laughing or crying: the strongest image is that of a small child who laughs when someone falls to the ground (or pretends to fall: and in fact clowns, in shows for children, often use this kind of trick to make them laugh), or cry because something is taken out of their hand. In the case of mental illness the behaviours are not so much "infantile" as "filial". It is here that we recognize the message of a cry for help, and a starting point for treatment to recover. And in fact it is a call for help to restore access to primary love with the same-sex parent.