Chapter 9: From Psychopathology to Service: A New View of the Clinical Psychology Intervention

A radical critique of the notion of psychopathology comes from the constructionist perspective (i.e., Gergen, 1985; Sharf & Vanderford, 2003). According to this view, psychopathological categories are not the byproduct of specific modalities of the mind’s functioning, encapsulated in the head of the individual; rather they are socially connoted scripts, with which some individuals identify, as a result of and at the same time with the function of regulating their position in contexts of discourse.

In the Italian clinical psychology field, Renzo Carli (1987) deepened the critical analysis of psychopathology as the terrain of clinical intervention. He highlighted two interconnected points. On the one hand, the acknowledgment that the notion of disease entails the reference to an etiopathogenetic theory; this, in turn, is grounded on a normative physiological model. Both these aspects are available in the case of physical disease, but they are not given in regard to mental processes (Szasz, 1987). On the other hand is the acknowledgment that the psychopathological condition is necessarily defined in terms of a contextual canon¹; thus, the treatment has the intrinsically conformist implication of restoring the canon defined by the cultural norm. Examining this line of thought in greater depth, Grasso and Stampa (2011) showed that the nosographic interpretation of the problems that leads people to contact a psychologist involves the scotomization of the specific, idiosyncratic, contextual content of the request, namely of its psychological value.