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.