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

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). -- 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, MD, Director of the Academy of Family Psychotherapy, Professor of Psychology, University of Rome Author description: Vincenzo Di Nicola, M.D. is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and relational therapist in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. After studies in clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, Di Nicola trained and collaborated in family therapy with Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Maurizio Andolfi and more recently in global mental health with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma. He has held clinical and teaching appointments at the universities of Ottawa, Queen's and McGill and is an Honorary Professor of Law in Minas Gerais, Brazil and a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Di Nicola is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal and a doctoral candidate at the European Graduate School.