The role of affections in psychic life, in diagnostic and therapeutic work. The personalities "as if"

The concept of personality "as if" is deeply relevant. Taken away from psychopathology, in which Helen Deutsch develops it, it is transported into the realm of "normality" by Paul Roazen, who analyses the imitative, not already identifiable, processes of bonding with the leader. The result is a vision of a general conformism that does not spare even the members of our profession. In therapeutic work, the social phenomenon of the personalities "as if" appears evident through the "therapeuticism" which is often trained since training, i.e. through the prevailing attention to classifications and the therapeutic result. In essence, such psychoanalytic conformism can be seen as the collective "as if" of our profession, where, despite numerous references to authenticity, recipes are written about what one "must" do. A clinical exemplification attempts to show the peculiarity of the concept and the difficulties that can be encountered in diagnosing it.