I am schizophrenic, believe it or not! A dialogue about the importance of recognition

The main aim of our article is to discuss the importance of recognition in the psychotherapeutic process. To achieve recognition, patient and clinician should be able to build a space where the patient can find an “ecological niche” in which he can find an “adaptive equilibrium” between the burdensome demands of his psychopathological condition and the external, imposing demands of society. The clinician’s recognition is to a patient the condition of possibility to survive the “oceanic” social currents without integrating too much into them, and in so doing losing all his “non-adaptive” traits, his “pathological” freedom and unique and valuable way to interpret and henceforth live in the world. A schizophrenic person and his psychiatrist discuss the patient’s condition and his way of dealing with it. A dialogue between a “view-from-within” and a sympathetic “view-from-without” whose purpose is to build a circle of reciprocal recognition that allows the patient to come out of isolation and try to construct a fulfilling, even though schizophrenic, life. The concluding remarks will not be a definitive and “closed” examination of the material brought forth by the dialogue, but the opening of a series of questions for further research on this very important and promising theme in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia.