Working with “Difficult” Patients: An Interview with Jorge García Badaracco

Abstract

Jorge García Badaracco's pioneering work is well-known in his native Argentina, but not so much elsewhere. Since he was appointed as Director of a service in the Borda Buenos Aires Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in 1959, García Badaracco started to make use of all available resources to overcome the many problems that the analysis of "difficult patients" (often psychotic) entails. In later years, he developed his ground-breaking "multifamily groups", that is, therapeutic groups that included patients, their relatives, nurses, members of the staff, and that offered the possibility to work simultaneously, in one single therapeutic intervention, on the individual, familiar, and social dimension of the mind. In this interview with García Badaracco, Francesca Viola Borgogno introduces the reader to this distinguished figure, as well as to some of his most original theoretical and clinical concepts, such as "the maddening object", "the pathological and pathogenic interdependence", "the healthy virtuality", and so on.

Extreme trauma in a polluted area: Bonds and relational transformations in an Italian community

“…It is an "open doors" group, whose participants meet once every week. Each session lasts for ninety minutes and attendance is open to patients, their relatives, health workers, and whoever else wishes to participate, offering the possibility to simultaneously work on the individual, familial, and social dimensions of the mind (Borgogno F. V., 2010). As García Badaracco highlights (1989, the functioning of the multifamily group may be understood as an "extended mind," whereby each participant enriches the whole by contributing his or her point of view: Indeed, each individual contribution stimulates the potential of the group to generate associations through a continuous interplay of identifications, fostered by the fact that participants who are not directly involved in a situation regarding other people or other families can think more clearly.…”

Helping traumatized people survive: a psychoanalytic intervention in a contaminated site

“…Although our group maintained the same setting of the original one, points of convergence and divergence emerged in our clinical practice. As the latter, in our setting group and family dimensions together gave birth to a “ mini-society ” that allowed the development of the “ healthy vitality ” of the patient ( Borgogno, 2010 ). However, we have to underline that psychiatric patients who are unable to separate themselves from their families are profoundly dissimilar from mesothelioma patients, who are instead obliged to separate from their loved ones in a very short time.…”

Contribuciones para mejorar la eficacia de la conducción de grupos multifamiliares. Una revisión sistemática

“…-Cinco se centran fundamentalmente en la descripción de la planificación y el proceso de trabajo llevado a cabo en una práctica de GMF (Liberman & Liberman, 2003;Litzke & Glazer, 2004;Lyman, Braude & George, 2014;McFarlane, 2016;Poole et al, 2017) -Y uno es una entrevista en profundidad a Jorge García Badaracco, pionero de la implementación de los Grupos Multifamiliares de orientación psicoanalítica en Argentina (Borgogno, 2010).…”

“…Acción en la que inciden seis de los quince trabajos analizados (Borgogno, 2010;Bamberg et al, 2008;Couchman et al, 2014;Litzke & Glazer, 2004;Oruche et al, 2014;y Straits-Troster et al, 2013). cionar un lugar seguro para hablar abiertamente con los seres queridos sobre las dificultades que experimentaron durante el combate y la rehabilitación (p. 544).…”