Il Lausanna Trilogue Play: potenzialità diagnostiche e prospettive di intervento nella valutazione delle competenze interattive familiari.

Background: interactive-relational perspective stands as an innovative approach in developmental psychopatology, making it possible to understand mental disorders as results of envirenmental or parental failures in affective attunement and emotional contact between child and his caregivers. This point of view is central in the building up of assessment procedures focused on the observation of child-caregivers interactions. The ongoing development of theoretical and clinical models focused on developmental psychopatology as mailny attributable to relational disturbances, raises the need to identify effective and useful methods to assess the quality of early relationships in which the child structures and expresses his psychic disease. Objective: in reference to model proposed by Fivaz-Depeursinge and Corboz-Warnery (1999) with regard to the study of early triadic interactions, this work is an exploratory study on the clinical and diagnostic usefulness of an observational method designes to examine family interactions in a play situation named the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP). Method: the LTP was administered within the clinical-diagnostic path to 15 families applying to a second level "Parenting Service" established in Padova University. The families were asking for a psychological consultation of their 7-11 years old children. Setting, instructions and encoding method of the LTP procedure have been adapted to the different age groups of children in line with the authors' work. Critical discussion and conclusions: data analysis highlights the potentiality of the methodology , in that it proved useful in providing an overview of the characteristics of family interactions at the same time underlining limitations and resources of the family relational functioning. Analysis emphasizes how families had difficulties in affective attunement during play situation. Further research could deepen these results about the usefulness of LTP in diagnostic field, and in treatment design or redefinition.