Toward a More Comprehensive Understanding of Pathogenic Beliefs: Theory and Clinical Implications

According to Control-Mastery Theory, an integrative cognitive-dynamic theory of mental functioning, psychopathology, and psychotherapy process, functional psychopathology derives from pathogenic beliefs. Pathogenic beliefs associates a healthy and adaptive goal to a danger, are generally developed during the developmental period to adapt to traumas and are unconsciously tested by patients in psychotherapy to be disproved. We propose the existence of pathogenic beliefs that are mainly encoded as bodily tensions, sensations, emotions, intensions, mental images and expectations, and only secondarily or not at all as words. These non-verbal pathogenic beliefs painfully affect patients’ bodily states, emotions and behaviours without the patients being able to understand the reasons of their own sensations, reactions and actions. In order to disprove these non-verbal pathogenic beliefs in therapy, it is not enough that clinician help their patients make them explicit; clinicians have also to adapt their overall attitude, non-verbal and paraverbal communications, and to adjust the setting, the nuances and the “atmosphere” of the therapeutic relationship according to the specific developmental traumas that gave rise to these beliefs, the goals thwarted by them and to how the patient test them. The disconfirmation of pre-verbal pathogenic beliefs may also be facilitated by psychotherapy techniques that address the problems of patients on a bodily level. In order to disprove preverbal pathogenic beliefs, an embodied corrective emotional experience is needed.