Vincenzo Di Nicola

Vincenzo Di Nicola is a Canadian psychologist, psychiatrist, and family therapist.

Di Nicola is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal^[1] and the recipient of the Camille Laurin Prize from the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec.^[2] He was made a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.^[3]

Di Nicola is the author of two books, A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy, integrating family therapy and cultural psychiatry to create cultural family therapy, and Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community, an overview of principles of relational psychology and therapy.

Education

Di Nicola obtained a BA in psychology and a diploma in psychiatry from McGill University and an MD from McMaster University.^[4][5]

Work

Di Nicola's career has shown several foci, examining children, families and culture in various combinations.^[6][7][8][9] His approach to working with families across cultures brought together a new synthesis of family therapy and transcultural psychiatry.^[6][7] Critical reviews were positive and encouraging by leaders in family therapy, such as Mara Selvini Palazzoli^[10] and Celia Jaes Falicov.^[11] When his work was collected into his model of cultural family therapy in A Stranger in the Family,^[8] it was received as an important contribution to working with immigrant families.^[12][13][14]

Another integration was in bringing together child psychiatry with transcultural research to call for the new field of transcultural child psychiatry.^[9] He was the plenary speaker at a conference on transcultural issues in child psychiatry, at McGill University a pioneering research center in transcultural psychiatry, the proceedings of which were published (Sayegh, et al., 1992).^[15]

His work on eating disorders called for a new historical and cultural view of what he called "anorexia multiforme," a form of suffering that is a cultural chameleon, expressing itself differently in different times, cultures and places.^[16][17])^[18]

Di Nicola's work also focuses on the interface between philosophy and psychiatry, addressing philosophical issues ranging from the rights of children, to employing Giorgio Agamben's "state of exception" in definitions of human being and in trauma studies:

• "Review-essay: On the rights and philosophy of children"^[19]
• "States of exception, states of dissociation: Cyranoids, zombies and liminal people - An essay on the threshold between the human and the inhuman"^[20]
• "Where the exception becomes the norm — At the juncture of culture, trauma and psychiatry: Applying Agamben’s “state of exception” to trauma studies and cultural competence"^[21]

Books

• The Myth of Atlas: Families and the Therapeutic Story (Editor and translator; Routledge, 1989), ISBN 0876305494
• Families That Abuse (Foreword; W.W. Norton, 1992), ISBN 0393701220
• A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy (W.W. Norton, 1997), ISBN 0393702286
• Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community (Atropos, 2011), ISBN 0983173451
• The Unsecured Present (Atropos, 2012), ISBN 978-0-9853042-7-0

References