Working with "difficult" patients: an interview with Jorge García Badaracco, by Francesca Viola Borgogno

Jorge García Badaracco's pioneering work is well-known in his native Argentina, but not so much elsewhere. Since he was appointed as Director of a service in the Borda Buenos Aires Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in 1959, García Badaracco started to make use of all available resources to overcome the many problems that the analysis of "difficult patients" (often psychotic) entails. In later years, he developed his ground-breaking "multifamily groups", that is, therapeutic groups that included patients, their relatives, nurses, members of the staff, and that offered the possibility to work simultaneously, in one single therapeutic intervention, on the individual, familiar, and social dimension of the mind. In this interview with García Badaracco, Francesca Viola Borgogno introduces the reader to this distinguished figure, as well as to some of his most original theoretical and clinical concepts, such as "the maddening object", "the pathological and pathogenic interdependence", "the healthy virtuality", and so on.