This book will build on and develop the assumption that to be human means to be in dialogue. Dialogue is a unitary concept that will attempt to address in a coherent way three essential issues for clinical practice: ‘What is a human being?’, ‘What is mental pathology?’, and ‘What is care?’. It will argue that to be human means to be in dialogue with alterity, that mental pathology is the outcome of a crisis of one’s dialogue with alterity, and that care is a method wherein dialogues take place whose aim is to re-enact interrupted dialogue with alterity within oneself and with the external world.This book is an attempt to re-establish such a fragile dialogue of the soul with herself and with others. Such an attempt is based on two pillars: a dialectic, person-centred understanding of mental disorders, and values-based practice. Building on and extending these two approaches, it aims to improve therapeutic practice in mental health care. Within this framework, care is a dialogue with a method—or better, a method wherein dialogues take place whose aim is to re-enact interrupted dialogue with alterity within oneself and with the external world. The method at issue includes devices and practices that belong both to logic—e.g. the method for unfolding the Other’s life-world and to rescue its fundamental structure—and empathy—e.g. the readiness to offer oneself as a dialoguing person, and the capacity to resonate with the Other’s experience and attune/regulate the emotional field.
Meeting the challenges of the new frontier of youth mental health care
