PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL NARRATIVE FORMS

Abstract

During psychotherapy, patients describe their experiences in the form of storytelling. Our goal here is to define the criteria that will allow a therapist to distinguish an effective narrative from a dysfunctional one. On the basis of a number of criteria, we provide a classification of the psychopathological forms that can be taken by the discourse of patients observed during psychotherapy. Two main categories are described: (a) Impoverished narratives, which are divided into the subcategories, Deficit in Narrative Production and Alexithymical Narratives; and (b) Integration deficit which is subdivided into Basic integration deficit, Deficit in integration between multiple representations of self and of others, Overproduction of narratives and deficit in hierarchization, and lastly Deficit in attribution to the correct mental function and deficit in distinction between reality and fantasy (between primary and disconnected representations).