Multimedia Psychotherapy

Multimedia Psychotherapy is a new technique that helps patients to mourn and overcome loss and grief experiences as well as blocks and inhibitions in the life cycle. The method can be easily summarized in 5 steps: the intake (where the therapist explains the technique to the patient), the "picture sessions" (where the patient, helped by his/her own family, brings in pictures and works them through freely associating with memories and emotions evoked by the images), the "music session" (during which a song or music is chosen by the patient in order to become the soundtrack of the "psychodynamic montage" which a multimedia artist, who collaborates with the therapist, will produce and then give back to the therapist), the "screening session" (where patient and therapist watch, comment, and elaborate the video together), and the outcome. Although this psychotherapeutic technique is rooted in a psychodynamic approach, it can be applied and integrated within any form of psychotherapy. Multimedia Psychotherapy is conceived as a manual in order to let all health professionals who work as psychotherapists to learn the new technique and apply it with their own patients. Excerpts from sessions are quoted to describe each step of the therapy. At the same time, two theoretical chapters are devoted to explain how and why the "memory objects" created by the multimedia artist are so effective in helping patients to mourn their complicated grief and/or overcome their blocks or inhibitions in normal development. Finally a new supervision model (the Clinic and Dreams Workshop) is described as well as a training group experience, once again through excerpts of such new teaching seminars. The book is written as a "story" in the format of "narrative medicine." It ends opening new horizons: how to use Multimedia Psychotherapy to make "memory objects for the future," during pregnancy and prenatal life, or to help Alzheimer patients not to lose their capacity to recognize their own relatives.

Domenico Arturo Nesci is professor of community psychology at the Nursing School of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and psycho-oncology at the Scuola Internazionale di Psicoterapia nel Setting Istituzionale (SIPSI) in Rome, Italy.

Acknowledgments
Collaborators
Foreword (by Robert O. Pasnau)
"Am I Crazy?"
Introduction
Chapter 1: The First Case
Chapter 2: Multimedia Psychotherapy: Story of a Training Group
Chapter 3: Multimedia Psychotherapy Step by Step: from Intake to Outcome
Chapter 4: Selecting the Pictures
Chapter 5: Choosing the Soundtrack
Chapter 6: Working with the Artist
Chapter 7: The Screening Session and the Outcome
Chapter 8: Theoretical Reflections on Multimedia Psychotherapy
Chapter 9: Supervision in Multimedia Psychotherapy
Chapter 10: Looking at Multimedia Psychotherapy from Different Perspectives
Chapter 11: New Horizons in Multimedia Psychotherapy
Bibliography
Index
About the Author