Contributions person-centred psychotherapy to personcentred psychopathology

Abstract

The scope of psychopathology as a discipline, its method and targets are important to understand mental disorder as well as define what is to be assessed in the mental state examination. For more than a century the request of objectivity and reliability for research, strict insurance policies and the increase of clinical workload have enforced categorization and operationalization of psychopathological phenomena. This move was blamed to have led psychopathology into a dead end, undermining present research and clinical diagnosis. By revisiting the some of the missteps of xxI century psychopathology we find assorted phenomenological and ontological predicates that might have contributed to such damage. They include changes in the nature of the approach necessary to access and collect psychopathological phenomena as well as a reductionism in the dimension of meaning that is relevant for psychopathology. This essay suggests that the foundational stones of the Person-centred Approach (PCA) are a relevant training by addressing most the previous qualms. It is our belief that psychopathologists trained in PCA could improve their relational framework and acquire the ontological precepts to correctly access and assess a wider range of mental phenomena.