The Postrationalist Perspective: Personal Meaning Organisations (PMO) and Their Functioning

The intention of this chapter is to describe the functioning of the individual in its harmonic, neurotic and psychotic expressions through the study of Personal Meaning Organisations according to the postrationalist model. From an ontological perspective, emotions are forms of knowledge and correspond to that immediate ordering of reality that we perceive as given in the flow of our praxis of living (Guidano, La Complessità del Sé. Bollati Boringhieri, 1988). The progressive articulation of a processual self means that experiencing takes place constantly, simultaneously and on a double level: that of immediate experience and that of explanation, of the conscious self-image. Through language, we make sense of experience, thereby constructing our narrative identity, which remains unique and unrepeatable thanks to the constant dialectic between the narrator self that explains and evaluates and the protagonist self that experiences (Ricoeur, Self as another. Jaca Book, 2016). The work of psychotherapy according to this perspective is thus oriented towards a reading from the point of view of the experiencer, recognising, once reconstructed with him, his specific personal meaning that moves him along the path of existence, even in its most concrete aspects. The postrationalist approach thus offers a study of human experience from the perspective of the individual who experiences and knows. This perspective is absolutely attentive to the person in his or her complexity precisely because its ultimate aim is the reconstruction and articulation of the individual’s specific personal meaning, a systemic invariant that sustains the internal coherence of the individual’s functioning. Again, this perspective is likely to prove to be a model that can be applied to different types of human functioning, from the normal one, with harmonious modes in its existential themes, to the neurotic one with its short and episodic discontinuities to the ragged and coarse fragmentariness of psychotic mechanisms. After a theoretical-applicative introduction that will also deal with specific aspects of functioning declined for the four Personal Meaning Organisations, the author will propose as a clinical exemplification the description of a psychotherapy phase with a patient with panic attack disorder. The treatment was carried out by stabilising emergencies through the reconstruction of specific emotional activations and their meanings with the aim of increasing the patient’s self-awareness. … … ((Chinese saying)