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Article Excerpt
This article illustrates the state of the art for mental health counseling in Italy through a historic and postmodern perspective. The context of Italian mental health counseling is complex and full of new and old premises, events, and arguments. On the one side, the way counseling has developed and is perceived in Italy results from the intersection of old cultural legacies, such as Christianity, and new challenges, such as a multicultural and multiethnic society. On the other side, the development of mental health counseling in Italy is the result of the encounter between the pragmatic, optimist U.S. counseling and the phenomenological, hermeneutic traditions of European schools. The article ends with an exploration of the potentials that may arise from an ongoing communication between US. and Italian mental health professionals.
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It is an arduous endeavor to address the topic of counseling and psychotherapy in Italy in a few pages. The subject is, in fact, so vast and full of historical, cultural, and theoretical facets that every depiction will always end up being a rough reduction. Having to come to a decision on what to write about, we chose to focus on three main areas that will help mental health counselors understand the state of the art of mental health counseling and psychotherapy in Italy. The first of these areas is the historical origins of counseling in Italy. The second section examines the complexity of the professional training and legislative system. Finally, the last part addresses the influence of central cultural values and institutions, namely the Roman Catholic Church, in pressing issues related to gender equality, cultural diversity, and minority populations. We purposely wanted to avoid the use of banal stereotypes about Italian culture or cultures, such as supposed attempts of reifying cultural differences between North and South Italy (Gemignani, 2003).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING IN ITALY
Introduction
Regardless of the field of knowledge, when presenting a categorization of things, we have to carefully consider our assumptions and intentions on this process. In fact, no classification is neutral or impartial, especially when history is considered. If we want, even briefly, to illustrate the historical facts of mental health counseling, we must address our view of that discipline (Cimino & Dazzi, 2003). In fact, placing a boundary between what falls into and what remains outside the definition of mental health counseling is often a subjective and political act (Cushman, 1995).
Interestingly enough, the word counseling does not find a precise correspondent in the Italian language (Vitelli, Galiani, Amodeo, Adamo, & Valerio, 1998). Although often used as a synonym for psychotherapy in mental health contexts, counseling has a broader meaning that includes a top-down, instead of collaborative, process of advising, which corresponds to the Italian word consulenza. As in the Anglo-Saxon world, the word counseling also is used outside therapeutic settings, such as in vocational, school, organizational, legal, or spiritual counseling. In this article, however, we focus on the most common interpretation of counseling as related to and partially synonymous with psychotherapy. In addition, we will consider mental health counseling or psychotherapy as those practices and theories that are connected to a specific professionalism regarding psychological issue or discomfort and its treatment, which prevailingly occurs through the therapeutic relationship between the client/patient and the counselor. Mental health counseling operates within historical and traditional narratives or grand narratives (Lyotard, 1979) that culturally define the extent of its possibility and agency.
The Origins
Having established a definition of psychotherapy or mental health counseling, we can positively say that in Italy the origins of psychotherapy correspond to the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement. Dr. Edoardo Weiss, born in Trieste in 1889, can be considered the precursor of mental health counseling in Italy. He was a student of Freud. After moving from Vienna to Trieste, in Northeast Italy, Weiss became the first Italian psychoanalyst. In 1932, he cofounded the Rivista Italiana di Psicoanalisi (Italian Psychoanalysis Review) with Cesare Musatti, who was born in 1897 and is considered the most influential and famous Italian psychoanalyst.
Despite the intellectual enthusiasm surrounding the development of psychology, the cultural climate of the period was unfavorable toward the field: Both the powerful Catholic Church and the Fascist regime deemed psychoanalysis a threat to their authority (Colombo, 2003). Their pressure and authoritarianism silenced the just-born Rivista and repressed the spread of psychoanalysis in Italy. In 1923, the Gentile Reformation of the education system had decreed the abolition of the teaching of psychology in Italian schools and its substitution for philosophy and pedagogy of idealistic orientation. Weiss had to migrate to the United States in 1934; and, a few years later, Musatti lost his university teaching position, which he regained only after the war following the publication of his famous Trattato di Psicoanalisi (Treatise on Psychoanalysis) in 1949. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis set down the bases for Italian psychology and mental health counseling: Hereafter, it would be the point of comparison for all other forms of psychotherapy.
After the end of World War II in 1945, Italian psychology started to be increasingly open to the U.S. influences of experimental psychology as well as the interpretations and practices of mental health services. The post-war context was a time of deep societal changes in Italy. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the public demand for mental health counseling become increasingly strong and popular (Cancrini, 1982). In spite of this, psychology achieved an important scientific status only in the 1970s, with the simultaneous launch of the first two psychology degrees at the universities of Padua and Rome in 1971. These openings into the closed and elitist academic milieu became the doors through which other theories, and consequently other forms of clinical theory and practice, came onto the Italian scene. Since then and in just two decades, theoretical diversity in mental health counseling has flourished.
The university world fully accepted and recognized the scientific, almost exclusively in the sense of measurable, aspects of psychology, especially its cognitive dimensions. However, despite this promising start, academics kept distance from and expressed annoyance toward mental health counseling, which was deemed too unscientific. For many years, counseling and clinical psychology were present only in the medical schools of Siena and Bologna and were not part of any other university curricula. This situation created a fertile ground for the proliferation of private schools in mental health counseling, even though their standards of education and training were not regulated by strict legal controls until the...
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