Davide Tomatis on ‘Working in the moment: margin of success for coma patients in Minimally Conscious State’

Abstract: Too often Minimally Conscious State (MCS) patients are not considered as treatable due to the difficulty in recognising and reading the essential minimal changes in a patient. Prof. Cecilia Morosini worked with patients in this condition and she would have agreed with Mark Solms’ paper “The conscious Id” (Solms, 2013) that the brain stem can be considered as the base of consciousness. She also believed that brain plasticity can be transferred from the rehabilitators to the patients if the rehabilitators are able to understand the smallest communicative signals from the patients due to psychoanalytic empathy. This work is about psychotherapy treatment with brain injured patients from the Associazione Elìce in Milan (Italy). In this particular case, the psychotherapist uses the Gestalt method and she is inspired by the Prof. Morosini ideas and by the Daniel Stern’s ‘now-moments’ theory. We believe that it is very important to pay attention to the little interactions that, when they are seen and recognised, can turn into ‘moments of meeting’ and enhance the possibility of change. We will show a clinical case with a patient in a MCS that is unable to speak and needs a different way to communicate. We chose to use affective touch, physical and eye contact to find a way to reawaken his sense of self through the expression of emotions in the therapeutic relationship. Working with MCS patients allows us to study the plasticity of the brain at its roots. We believe that the research into the MCS is today at the forefront of Neuropsychoanalysis study

Short Bio: Davide Tomatis is a psychologist and a psychoanalytical psychotherapist. He works privately and as a consulting psychologist at the Mauriziano Umberto I Hospital in Turin (Italy) in the Department of Functional Rehabilitation of brain injured people. In this particular field, he also works with the Associazione Elìce and the Fondazione Morosini in Milan. As a member of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, he’s interested in the relationship between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, in particular in rehabilitation and psychotherapy for brain injured people.

Thursday, 3 December, 2015, 6 pm, at UCL, 26 Bedford Way (north corner), in room 305 on the third floor (note the new venue)

For more details, please click here: npsastudygroup