Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community

Book description:

In these seven letters, practising psychiatrist Vincenzo Di Nicola offers wisdom to a young therapist from 25 years of experience conducting relational therapy. Ranging from what to read and how to begin therapy, the letters cover therapeutic temperaments and technique, how to create a relational dialogue, the myths of individual psychology and the need for relational psychology, the evolution of therapy in the past century and when therapy is over-all the while looking forward to the relational practices of the coming community. This book complements Di Nicola's model of working with families presented in A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy (New York and London: W. W. Norton).

Awarded the prestigious Prix Camille-Laurin of the Association des médecins psychiatres du Québec - the Camille Laurin Prize of the Quebec Psychiatric Association.

From the Foreword:

"It's a beautiful idea, this project of turning to young people... The relational dialogue offers an important new direction of study to discover the deep basis of the therapeutic alliance, in order to understand the still too-little known phenomenon of 'change'... This is what you have brought together in your book: the search for the whole regarding the person and, at the same time, the network of primary affective relationships that we call the family and of social relationships ..."
--from the Foreword by Maurizio Andolfi, M. D.
Director of the Academy of Family Psychotherapy
Professor of Psychology, University of Rome

Advance Review:

"Di Nicola is a true master of constructive inquiry, synthesis, and brilliant creativity. Memorable aphorisms leap from every page of this very wise, thoughtful, and beautifully written book in which the healing process of discovering and making meaning to help reorder the lives of troubled persons is clarified. I highly recommend this book for all who are or would be therapists!"
--Armando Favazza, M. D., M. P. H.
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry
University of Missouri-Columbia
Author of Bodies Under Siege