Caso clínico: «la mujer de la muleta»; construcción y reconstrucción de una crisis agorafóbica

Agoraphobia is originated in a sort of childish dependency through which the child learns how to adapt himself to a restricted environment, where the persons who look after him or his parents do not let him move freely, preventing him from learning how to explore and making him consider, once far away from them, any emotion related to the extemal world as dangerous. The agoraphobic can envolve in two very different directions: if he successes in his attempts to explore, he will become a person who does not tolerate closed situations; but if the pressure of the parents is too intensive, the child or adolescent will break clown and adapt himself to it. The first one will avoid any kind of link, the second one will not deign to explore. The case studied belongs to the first type; it is a woman in whom an agoraphobic crisis is cleveloping after recovering from a surgical operation. The author describes the succesive steps of the psychotherapy which allows the patient to be progressively aware of the factors involved in the crisis. The phannacological psychiatry offers sedatives and or antidepressants which make decrease the symptoms; but since that treatment does not bring about an understanding of the problem, attacks generally recur