[Automatic translation from Catalan]:
My first contact with the professional world of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis was in 1973, when I started doing internships at the Mental Institute of Santa Creu and Sant Pau, and immediately put me on the path of institutional analysis.
For me it was a surprise because I was studying the third year of Psychology, which at that time was a section within the degree of the Philosophy and Arts Faculty of the University of Barcelona, and there we studied the polemics between the various theories on psychism, always considered as an individual phenomenon. Some of these theories emphasized the role of environmental, cultural, and external stimuli, but in a very theoretical and general way. I already knew and was much more interested in psychoanalysis which, on the one hand, focused on the internal organization of psychism and, on the other, analyzed the incidence of external factors but in a much more precise and articulated way with the internal world and psychopathology.
But at the Mental Institute (abbreviated «the Mental»), with psychoanalytical psychiatrists and psychologists, it went much further than pointing out the family factors that had given rise to the disorder. It was also pointed out, and attempted to act, about the psychiatric institution itself, historically seen not as a place of healing but as a place of chronification, even of «freezing», of the disorder. I will not expand on the phenomena of the «designated patient», the iatrogenic family functioning and others that at that time were already recognized, but on a central fact around the[…]
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