The Clinical Framework

In our view — as taught by Gregory Bateson, Ernesto De Martino, Georges Devereux, Franz Fanon, Félix Guattari, Mary Douglas, and Julia Kristeva — it is reductive to imagine therapeutic processes detached from the sociocultural contexts in which clinical practice is embedded. Clinical intervention and therapeutic models influence one another, continuously reshaping each other.

Transcultural contexts refer to the differences among social and community systems, to ways of living, beliefs, and habits that characterize different human groups. When faced with rigidified systems of belief, the transcultural relationship functions like a thaw: it generates movement, blending, expansion. Systems are never static; we continuously witness contamination and creolization. This is not a new phenomenon, yet it requires a new gaze — an awareness essential to therapeutic practice.

A pathological system is a frozen system: it has stopped time, it has lost generative capacity. And yet, this very immobility evokes a paradoxical curiosity in therapy — a sense of wonder in front of a configuration that does not change, that repeats its symptoms, that reproduces discriminatory patterns based on gender, race, age, health, or performativity. This wonder pushes clinical work to learn from the system, to listen to its voices and its blockages, fostering transformations that emerge from within, without imposition. The systemic unconscious is always active, even when the manifest structure appears immobile.

Therapeutic experience requires respect, curiosity, and the renunciation of coercive interventions. One of the key teachings of our School concerns trust in the transformation of systems through positive connotation: the very dynamics that generate pathology can shift when the context sustaining them changes. As Bateson (1972) states, the double bind forces the subject trapped in paradox into trans-contextual jumps, opening new evolutionary possibilities. This orientation allows us to interpret contemporary symptoms in their fluidity.