José María Álvarez has been working for almost forty years in public health institutions (specialised psychiatric hospitals and general hospitals) and in his own practice.
For more than three decades, he has also been involved in the training of specialists in psychiatry and psychologists with clinical specialisation in the field of psychiatry and mental health in a hospital context. This training takes place within the framework of the Spanish residency system MIR y PIR (Médicos Internos Residentes and Psicólogos Internos Residentes), which corresponds to several years of practice-oriented clinical specialist training in the public health sector.
His numerous publications focus primarily on three areas: psychopathology —in particular classical psychopathology—, psychoanalytically oriented therapeutic practice, and the history of psychopathology. In this context, he has also translated and annotated works by important French and German psychopathologists. These works have contributed significantly to familiarising Spanish-speaking audiences with the writings of authors such as Séglas, Schüle, Kraepelin, Gaupp, Clérambault and many others.
For over twenty years, José María Álvarez has been a leading proponent of what is known as the Other psychiatry. This is not a school or a closed theoretical construct, but rather an international working movement of psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists who critically examine the narrowing of psychiatry to purely biological or technical-administrative models. They are particularly interested in psychosis, its clinical diversity and its treatment through psychotherapy, as well as the recovery of classical psychopathological clinical practice as an indispensable basis for clinical thinking. Within this framework, José María Álvarez has initiated and supervised numerous research and publication projects, many of which have been published by Xoroi (Barcelona), where he edits several book collections.
His most important publications include —in addition to other works and translations— The Invention of Mental Illness, Studies on Psychosis and Principles of a Psychotherapy of Psychosis, as well as Let’s Talk About Madness and The Wounds of the Soul. The work that closes the list is the two-volume Vocabulary of Psychopathology, which he directed scientifically.
