Clinical psychology

According to Lev Vygotsky’s theory, every bodily deficiency not only changes a person’s attitude to the world but also entails social consequences, which makes its social and psychological rehabilitation so important. The way in which problems of deformity compensation and supercompensation are solved, is largely determined by a patient`s motivation. The paper deals with stuttering (logoneurosis) as an extreme form of broken communication; it analyses the peculiarities of stutteres and their families, and the specific features of treating this defect; it also dwells on issues involving family co-participation in social rehabilitation. The multilayered system of family group logo psychotherapy - treatment of stuttering children, teenagers and adults - is based on Yu.B. Nekrasova’s method of group logopsychotherapy. It also employs non-traditional techniques: Nekrasova’s dynamic psycho-therapeutic diagnostics and biblio-, kinesi-, symbol-, video- and cinema therapies.

This system may serve as a model for forming motivational involvement and intragenic activity by patients and their relatives in social rehabilitation processes. The paper describes the levels and psychological structure of motivational involvement and mechanisms of its formation in logopsychotherapeutic processes. Motivational involvement is understood as a source of a subject’s intragenic (inner) activity, the paper maps out strategies to form intragenic activity. The family group logopsychotherapeutic techniques may also help optimize communication between parent and child, doctor and patient, teacher and pupil, professor and student.

Aging can be viewed as a continuation of development and an active interaction with the environment during which regressive changes are combined with progressive new formations. It is believed that the self-determining nature of subjectivity in the elderly mediates self-awareness and favors self-acceptance as an active agent that determines the outcomes of one’s own life at this age as an autonomous self-regulating subject of one’s own activity. A formative experience proved the efficiency of using art therapy as a method for mobilizing personal resources during aging.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the dynamics of the psychological features and clinical symptoms in mitral valve prolapse (MVP) patients receiving long-term integrative psychotherapy for anxiety disorders (AD) and to investigate the psychological factors of their improvement in mental health as a result of psychotherapy. Thirty-two MVP patients with AD attended long-term integrative psychotherapy. Psychological and clinical examinations of the patients were made before and after the therapy courses and in a follow-up study after 2, 5, and 10 years. Data from the study show that 78.1% of the patients who attended psychotherapy sessions demonstrated valid improvements in self-rated psychological well-being and a reduction in their anxiety levels. Analysis of emotion-regulation strategies showed that psychotherapy encouraged the use of strategies effective for solving adaptive tasks. Positive dynamics in the development of personality reflection, the recognition of one’s emotional experiences, improved skills of self-regulation, and growing awareness of actual needs, individual purposes, and personality resources—all were associated with the reduction of MVP clinical symptoms. The psychiatrist who interviewed the patients reported that most of them were in sustained remission.

Oncologic disease should be considered one of modern society’s dominant pathologies because of its chronicity. Estimates of a patient’s adaptation to chronicity shapes the information given to the patient, which is a powerful strategy for changing the patient’s social representation from a mere clinical case to a psychosocial being. In this article, the patient’s persona, when captured in the social processes and relations involved in therapeutic acts, is conceptualized as the main actor on the stages and sets of hospitals. The informative act, in which information is given to a patient in a hospital, allows identification of the psychosocial profile inherent in the patient’s role; this profile describes some relevant categories, among which the “informed patient” and the “uninformed patient” stand out.

Any psychological paradigm needs a psychopathological system that helps professionals to describe and explain the behavioral expressions that deviate from “normal” (whether this term is used with the semantic property of statistical or ideal adaptations). In this work, I seek to present the system that I have been developing since 1998 among the psychologists at the Instituto Vegotsky de Lisboa (Vygotsky Institute of Lisbon), Portugal, to understand psychopathology with regard to the vygotskian approach. It was conceived and designed according to the work of Rita Mendes Leal and her contribution to socioemotional development theory, AR Luria’s systemic and dynamic theory of the human brain, the theory of Activity (dyatel’nost) of AN Leont’ev, and the psychopathological German school of E Kraepelin, presented and disseminated in Portugal in the early twentieth century by Professor Sobral Cid. It is intended to be a proposal to colleagues who are interested in postnonclassical psychology and a request for arguments.