Professor Vincenzo Di Nicola
This keynote presentation addresses the question, “What is called therapy?” echoing the question posed by Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (1954/1968) about the nature of thinking. We will survey three topics to answer it: (1) Accidental therapy – versions of Freud’s (1910) “wild psychoanalysis” demonstrate why we need theory to guide practice. (2) What is called therapy? confronts the facts that we do not have a consensual science of persons and that each new therapy elaborates a new psychology, discarding the old. Most psychologies and therapies also fail to account for the translation between levels of human functioning from biology to relationships. Finally, arguing that most schools of therapy don’t have congruence among (a) a theory of how problems arise (psychopathology, relational problems), (b) how to conduct therapy, and (c) a theory of change (Di Nicola & Stoyanov, 2021), the author proposes the minimal criteria for a comprehensive theory of therapy. (3) Changing the subject introduces Alain Badiou’s (Badiou & Tarby, 2013) ontology of the Event as a unifying model to achieve coherence and congruence in theorizing and practicing therapy. An Event is an unpredictable, non-deterministic innovation that arises from observable elements of an Evental site (predicament) but cannot be reduced to those elements, marking a clear line in the lifeworld of the individual, triggering a new identity to become a genuine subject. We will survey the characteristics of the Event, the types of subjects that arise from Events and pseudo-events, concluding with an Evental analysis of a clinical predicament and the possibilities for Evental therapy (Di Nicola & Farnsworth, in preparation).
Professor Vincenzo Di Nicola
Vincenzo Di Nicola is an Italian-Canadian psychologist, psychiatrist and family therapist, and philosopher of mind.
Di Nicola is a tenured Full Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry & Addiction Medicine at the University of Montreal, where he founded and directs the postgraduate course on Psychiatry and the Humanities, and Clinical Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at The George Washington University, where he gave The 4th Annual Stokes Endowment Lecture in 2013. He has taught in the Global Mental Health Faculty of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma affiliated with Harvard Medical School. In 2001, Di Nicola was made Professor, Honoris Causa, of Faculdades Integradas do Oeste de Minas (FADOM) in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Di Nicola was bestowed the Honorary Chair (Hon LD – Licentia Docendi) of Social Psychiatry and conferred the academic title of Honorary Professor (Hon MA Sc – Magister Scientiae ad Honorem) at the Milan School of Medicine of the Università Ambrosiana in 2021 for his contributions to the field of social psychiatry.