Beyond the Talking Cure Principle: The Individual Psychoanalytic Psychodrama as Therapeutic Paradigm for Psychoanalysis in Psychiatry

Michel Botbol

Starting with the observation that , due to the fact that talking cure principles and transference/ counter transference system are the two pillars of psychoanalysis as therapeutic method, talking cure is more than a verbal exchange and is therefore closely dependent from the possibility to engage into transference, this presentation will discuss one of the major critics the psychoanalytic model is facing in psychiatry : the limitation of its applicability to most mental heath patients around the world for logistic or psychological reasons.

Considering that tackling seriously this issue may be one of the main required advances in today psychoanalysis world wide we will present one of the methods designed to overcome this applicability issue: « the Individual Psychoanalytic Psychodrama », showing how it is a good candidate for this challenge. We will particularly focus on the fact that it is indeed well adapted to deal with the patients’ defensive functioning which are obstacles to the psychoanalytic principles and that, it is not, however, an universal panacea, it can be seen as a valuable therapeutic paradigm for psychoanalysis in psychiatry.