Over the last fifteen years, a great part of my scientific activity has focused on couples, and exquisitely sentimental themes such as enchantment and disenchantment in couples, and how to deal with these in therapy. It was the same psychopathology that led me to deal with these issues. Just think that falling in love can favor the symptomatic onset in people with phobic disorders, while, as a rule, if people with severe unipolar and bipolar depression fall in love, they recover almost immediately, as long as they are involved in the magic of the encounter. I also realized that the family unconsciously provides us with sentimental education, through the semantics that dominate the family conversation and the emotions that feed them.
Consequently, I have paid much attention to the very different intimate registers within each semantic. I have also paid attention to the profound differences in the relational dynamics between semantically homogeneous couples and couples characterized by different semantics, who consequently become the protagonists of many misunderstandings and enigmatic episodes.
Some previews are already available in these articles and chapters
Ugazio V. & Guarnieri S. (2018)
A couple in love entangled in enigmatic episodes. A semantic analysis
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy,44,3,438-457
doi:10.1111/jmft.12321
Ugazio, V.& Fellin, L.(2016)
Family Semantic Polarities and Positionings. A semantic analysis. In Rober,P.& Borcsa M. (eds.).Research perspectives in couple therapy: Discursive qualitative methods, Cham: Springer, pp. 125-148.Ugazio, V. (2016). Family semantic polarities as a guide for the therapeutic process.
In. McCarthy, Imelda & Simon, Gail (Eds.) (2016). Systemic Therapy as Transformative Practice.
Farnhill: Everything is Connected Press, pp. 368-391.
Furthermore, I’m working , in collaboration with the London Intercultual Couple Center run by Reenee Singh on intercultural couples which – at least in theory – should have low semantic cohesion. But is it really so?
The result of this collaboration is an article just pubblished in a monographic issue dedicated to anti-discrimination practices:
Ugazio, V., Singh, R. & Guarnieri, S. (2022)
The ‘Arab spring’ within an intercultural couple. Does the unmentioned ‘racial difference’ matter?
Journal of Family Therapy, 44(1), 56– 75.
It had already been published online:
Ugazio, V., Singh R., S. Guarnieri (2022).
Ugazio, V., Singh R., S. Guarnieri (2021) The “Arab spring” within an intercultural couple. Does the unmentioned ‘racial difference’ matter? Journal of Family Therapy, 44(1), 56– 75.
Here is also an article on a often central topic in couple therapies:
Ugazio V. (2019).
Tradire: Un mossa pericolosa per la coppia? [Cheating – a dangerous move for couples?]
Psicologia contemporanea, 269, 41-45.
