È con grande piacere che annunciamo la pubblicazione del testo Gestalt Therapy with Children. From Epistemology to Clinical Practice, frutto di una collaborazione internazionale tra il direttore del nostro Istituto, Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, la terapeuta israeliana Nurith Levi e il collega inglese Andrew Williams.
La prefazione del volume è stata curata da Violet Oaklander e la postfazione da Gordon Wheeler, illustri gestaltisti statunitensi.
In attesa della traduzione italiana… a tutti gli psicoterapeuti – non solo gestaltisti – interessati alla tematica, auguriamo una buona lettura e tanti spunti di riflessione critica.
«Children today come to therapy with problems related to anxiety, eating, lack of concentration, and difficulties in how they socialize and learn. This clinical picture is a dramatic mirror of the actual development of our society.
For years we have been witnessing events that show a widespread disowning of the human condition. Deaths following terrorist attacks or migration flows in the Mediterranean area, and dramatic climate changes that have drastically affected our spirit.
What does a child feel when she listens silently to the news and the comments of the adults, or when she is directly involved in such traumatic events? Children absorb the cruelty, and, even worse, the adults’ dissociation may lead them to perceive these events as “normal.”
Psychotherapy and child development research must acknowledge these new conditions in which children grow up, and clinical work should take account of this now widespread experiential background.
This book tries to outline how contemporary Gestalt psychotherapists face the actual clinical situation when they work with children. The aim is to develop new tools to help children and their families to feel part of the human community, in a way that is not desensitized.
It is addressed to psychotherapists of all approaches».