A tribute to Vittorio Guidano

The Guidano’s approach has pointed out importance of affective and emotional aspects for development of Self and has focused subjective manner of experience rearrangement, operating in experience/explanation interface, to identify basic aspects and processes that lead to knowledge of Self and others. Continuous swinging from immediate experience and explanations of such an experience produces two levels of knowledge: “tacit” (emotional, scarcely defined and conscious) and “explicit” (rational and conscious). Individual development is characterized by a self-referring process of a more and more complex arrangement of continuous and heterogeneous flowing of external stimuli, perceived and elaborated as identity and knowledge of Self and world. Attachment patterns (concerning quality of parental expected response, intrusion, interference and control levels, and invested empathy), can produce, on one hand, early emotional control disorders, and, on the other hand, can compromise further evolution of attachment patterns during late infancy, preadolescence and adolescence, impairing affective style and ability of engaging valid couple friendships. In Guidano’s approach, any psychopathological disorder (neurotic or psychotic, with respect to one’s flexibility, abstraction and self-integration abilities) reflects a perturbation of self-organization processes, essential for one’s internal coherence maintenance, with arising of a critic phase resolved by getting a newer and more complex and adaptive equilibrium; any symptom, independently by its semeiological characteristics, must be referred to an alteration of internal balance and coherence.