A dangerous method: dynamic clinical psychology and the challenge of understanding emotionality in social contexts

This contribution aims to discuss how and to what extent emotionality affects opinions, beliefs, attitudes, therefore, the social behaviour of entire communities. The construct of the unconscious is presented in a modern perspective, beyond the individual vicissitudes of personal conflicts, unresolved experiences, and psychopathology. Based on Matte Blanco’s bi-logic theory of mind (1975), emotions, as a process of attribution of meaning to objects, persons and events, grounded on primary categories (such as, good and evil, big and small, inside and outside), may be shared by groups of individuals as well as entire communities in the form of “local cultures” (Carli & Paniccia, 2003), regulating their social behaviour towards given social stimuli. Dynamic clinical psychology offers a theoretical framework, instruments and methodologies, such as the Emotional Text Analysis based on the lexical analysis of language, and ability to uncover this portion of shared emotionality in social contexts so that it can be made explicit, elaborated and transformed in unbiased and aware rational thoughts. Two case studies are briefly presented showing how dynamic clinical psychology can offer an “across the board” knowledge that can be fruitfully integrated in different fields, helping other professional profiles in designing and realizing practical solutions to improve communities’ quality of life, including their capacity to manage complex sets of information, thus preventing an abundance of stereotypes, simple thoughts, and primary emotions. I will conclude with a call on university teachers on their responsibility in supporting open mindedness in young generations and their ability to explore different contexts.