La vergogna e il “Complesso di Pinocchio”

Abstract

Many patients suffer to feel strange and ridiculous. Since their childhood they have been passing through failures, disappointments and humiliations which have generated a feeling of shame. When they were children, they always had to remember narcisistic needs of their parents and if they hadn’t did it they would have suffered extremely negative consequences: the ruinous loss of parental love. These boys don’t feel part of the group and they don’t realize to be human being made of flesh and blood, so the tension of their body lets them appear “like if” they were puppets, developing the “Pinocchio Complex” which regards the “gelotophobia” (from Greek gelos=laughter), the fear to be teased or mocked.
The family therapeutists Almuth Sellschoopp-Ruppel and Michael von Rad propose the treatment of the so called “Pinocchio syndrome” through a particular way of humorous dramatization: the humordrama