Toward a therapeutic relational complexity: cotherapy

Journal title RIVISTA DI PSICOTERAPIA RELAZIONALE
Author/s Maurizio Gallinari, Anna Maria Paulis
Publishing Year 2026 Issue 2025/62
Language Italian Pages 7 P. 69-75 File size 85 KB
DOI 10.3280/PR2025-062009
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Since its inception, the systemic-relational approach has regarded cotherapy as an effective method for working with complex psychopathological conditions such as schizophrenia, drugs addicted, and eating disorders. Working in cotherapy offers greater feedback on one’s way of being and engaging in therapy, while also representing a continuous opportunity for professional growth and mutual reflection. At the same time, the construction of a “therapeutic we” becomes a space in which the internal and interpersonal worlds of the cotherapists meet and relate. Our focus will be on those attunement processes that define the therapeutic process in all its complexity. Indeed, when working in cotherapy, the unfolding of multiple levels of relationship allows for unresolved dynamics in the patient’s current life history to be re-signified. These interpersonal processes develop across various relational dimensions ‒ intrapersonal, interpersonal, and suprapersonal ‒ which form the scaffolding of therapeutic relational complexity. The development of such therapeutic relational complexity managing critical moments in the complete therapeutic process.

Keywords: complexity, relationship, co-therapy, attunement, therapeutic process.

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Maurizio Gallinari, Anna Maria Paulis, Coterapia e alleanza terapeutica: la complessità della relazione terapeutica in "RIVISTA DI PSICOTERAPIA RELAZIONALE " 62/2025, pp 69-75, DOI: 10.3280/PR2025-062009