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depending on people without resources leaves the patient exposed, due to his or her defenseless position to any traumatic situations. García Badaracco held the view that within the psychic apparatus of a seriously mentally ill person a pathological symbiosis of master and slave can be formed, with interchangeable roles yet both mutually indispensable. It is in this permanent fixation to that maddening object that neither member of that symbiotic relation can reach a true individuation or autonomy. The mentally-ill patient is trapped in a relationship of two. This sickening, maddening plot can only be deconstructed by a third party, who provides a structuring function for the defenseless and immature ego. To be looked at and be seen as the ill or crazy person is potentially sickening. Yet, there is always a healthy virtuality within the person however ill he or she may be. Only when the true self is rescued by others, and so long as the necessary conditions are given, the self is able to gradually de-identify itself from the presences to the extent it feels it is “looked at” as healthy and not ill (ill being the way it was “ seen ” by the parents). It is only then that one can count on another person or others and relinquish the omnipotence with which one maintains the symptoms as a defense, to avoid establishing a healthy interdependent relationship. It is in this function of the third party that the therapist can perceive beyond the pathogenic and pathological identifications , the undeveloped potential healthy virtuality , refrained and masked by identifications and characters which hide it, the way Winnicott describes as false self . “A defensive organization in which there is a premature taking charge of the care functions of the mother, so that the baby or the child adapts to the environment while at the same time protecting and concealing the true self, or the source of impulses” ( Winnicott 1989, pp. 47). Such concealed potential virtuality corresponds to aspects of the Ego dissociated and halted during its development. A character is built up in order to keep the true hidden person ‘alive’. That soothing-structuring presence, which fosters the development of Ego resources to defend itself from the psychopathic actions imposed by others, follows the model of alterations of the Ego described by Freud in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Freud 1937). What emerges then is what Balint called the ‘New beginning’: “…(a) going back to something ‘primitive’, to a point before the faulty development started, which could be described as a regression, and (b), at the same time, discovering a new, better-suited, way which amounts to a progression” (Balint, 1968, pp.159). Thinking about it from the point of view of García Badaracco, this moment is related to the disidentification of those sick but indispensable presences that were worn out in the therapeutic process of psycho-emotional re-development. “There is a period of disidentifications of the maddening objects in which the patient feels he can not return to what he was before. The pathogenic characters with whom he used to identify have become blurred and a series of transformations arise within the psychic apparatus. Such new configurations being very new, still do not present a coherent picture “ (García Badaracco, 1980, pp. 271). However, García Badaracco cautions that the internal de-identification with maddening presences is a long gradual painstaking process as the patient may confuse the de-
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