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The psychotic breakdown, which is usually preceded by an inner change, presents an “opportunity to make a change,” not only from the patient’s point of view, but within the dynamics of the whole family. Referring to Freud´s Structural Theory of Id, Ego and Superego, Badaracco sees the Superego, the intrapsychic representative of society, as depicting the others in us. He expands the psychoanalytic thinking of the drive theory in viewing the mind as taking part in a field of reciprocal interdependencies . Viewed this way, the existence of the others in us is a universal phenomenon of the functioning of the human mind. The relationship of interdependence with those others in us , which was traumatic at some point during childhood, remains in the internal world of the person, excerting a pathogenic power and effect and producing pathological feeling experiences: “... the ‘constructive experiences’ are those that condition the creation of new ‘ego resources’, while ‘negative experiences’ condition what we call ‘traumatic experiences’; these will tend to create pathological and pathogenic ‘ego resources’, and will have a tendency to repetition, as always looking for a new opportunity for what some authors have called ‘a new beginning’ (Balint) or a re-development (Winnicott). Continuing with our way of thinking, traumatic experiences can be interpreted as experiences that leave pathological identifications, that is, they condition ‘presences’ of others inside us, with the pathogenic power they had at the time of the traumatic experience itself.” (García Badaracco, 2006b, p.4) When the need of a child is frustrated or not recognized due to the deficiencies of the parental objects, these may turn into maddening objects. In contrast to Melanie Klein, who considers the good object as only satisfying and the bad object as only frustrating (Klein, M., 1980), Garcia Badaracco states that the good object is the one which provides, with its structuring function, the conditions for the frustrating experiences to be more tolerable and for the satisfactory experiences to have a limit. On the other hand, he describes the bad object as the one which, due to its own deficiency, cannot provide those necessary elements. On the contrary, the bad object magnifies frustrations, envy and primitive hatreds, which is also characteristic of a maddening object. The many years of experience in public hospitals and in his own Multifamily Structured Therapeutic Community, addressing complex pathologies, allowed García Badaracco to discover the importance of reciprocal interdependencies in order to understand the mental pathology. To him, the mind is always comprised by normative reciprocal interdependencies, which provide security, and/or maddening pathogenic interdependencies. Through many years of clinical experience with seriously mentally ill patients and their families, he formulated his core idea of a basic component of mental functioning as a back and forth exchange between two minds: one, which is, developing and growing, and the other, which has already reached a particular level of development. Extending the understanding of Ego mechanisms of defense to encompass deeper aspects of the functioning of the mind, García Badaracco thought in terms of a subject to subject relation: two subjects with different characteristics in reciprocal interdependencies, which leads to conceptualization of “maddening presences.” In this context, the concept of “fixation”
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