[Brief psychotherapy in clinical medicine patients]

The criteria that "illness is biographical crisis od the individual" and that the only medicine is "personal medicine" is stressed. Clinical medicine, which covers medicine in its entirety, demands conceptual and doctrinal reaffirmations so that gradually the patient can come to be dealt with as a human being fron a holistic point of view, which commences with his complaint and consultation, continues with the interview and semiology, to finish with the diagnosis and therapy which, although in some cases it may be surgical, is still medical and integral. All the steps mentioned are bio-socio-cultural thus, whether in the practice of general clinical medicine or in the most specialized and technologically sophisticated clinical medicine, the animist component is not lacking and demands a minimum degree of "psychosomatic" Knowledge. The use of a psychotherapeutic technique is proposed which, while based on the psychoanalysis theory, is distanced technically from it as a "psychotherapy on limited time and goals", which abbreviates the disease, and is projected not as the "focus" of therapeutic work, but as a re-evaluation of the "life style" of each individual, and tends to help to develop a "project for life" suited to the possible personal, familiar and social well-being of the "patient". Technically speaking, this modality of brief psychotherapy is based on the nonuse of transferential interpretations, on impeding the regression od the patient, on facilitating a cognitice-affective development of his conflicts and thus obtain an internal object mutation which allows the transformation of the "past" into true history, and the "present" into vital perspectives. This technique is within reach of every health professional.