A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy

Rating:
Summary: A model to work collaboratively with families across culture
Review: "Meeting strangers" is a metaphor for the increasingly common experience of working with diversity in family therapy. This book offers a model for working with families across cultures, particularly immigrants, refugees, and minorities in mainstream society. Drawing together emerging trends in therapy and the human sciences, including narrative approaches, transcultural psychiatry, studies of autobiographical memory, and translation theory, the author offers an understanding of the "situated nature" of human predicaments and tools for translating the family's culture and idioms into a common language in a culturally responsive and collaborative way

Rating:
Summary: Bold, original, and incisive.
Review: Bold, original, and incisive, A Stranger in the Family pushes the boundaries of cultural perspectives for family work in postmodern times. Intellectually, DiNicola offers useful, fresh concepts and creative tools to descipher the complex relationship of culture and families. But he also reaches deeper and further, capturing the reader's emotions and imagination about the rich, creative encounters that are possible between therapists and clients of diverse cultures.--Celia Jaes Falicov, Ph.D., Editor, Cultural Perspectives in Family Therap

Rating:
Summary: A new landmark in family therapy
Review: DiNicola's "A Stranger in the Family" is a rare combination of science and enchantment, of hard research and compelling narrative, of clinical acumen and cultural insights. This new landmark in the field of family therapy is a true magnum opus.--Armando R. Favazza, M.D., M.P.H.Author, "Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry"

Rating:
Summary: A new landmark in family therapy
Review: DiNicola's "A Stranger in the Family" is a rare combination of science and enchantment, of hard research and compelling narrative, of clinical acumen and cultural insights. This new landmark in the field of family therapy is a true magnum opus. --Armando R. Favazza, M.D., M.P.H. Author, "Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry"

Rating:
Summary: This book will be a must read for family therapists!
Review: Dr.Di Nicola's book was a good read. I thought it was well written, and I know that he has put a lot of effort into this book. Anyways well done dad!!!

Rating:
Summary: This book will be a must read for family therapists!
Review: Dr.Di Nicola's book was a good read.I thought it was well written, and I know that he has put a lot of effort into this book. Anyways well done dad!!!

Rating:
Summary: Cultural family therapy
Review: From the Foreword: "A Stranger in the Family" is a fundamental volume that proposes the basis for a new way of thinking about and practicing family therapy, reintroducing emotion and meaning into the systemic paradigm. This is a book that breaks the mold, provocatively confronting the conformity of many books and schools of family therapy that make no mention of culture, race, class, religion, or other social variables. --Maurizio Andolfi, M.D., Director, Academy of Family Psychotherapy; Professor of Psychology, University of Rome. From the Introduction: "Every exit is an entrance somewhere else." My aim in this book is to open space for people who have been treated like minor characters in the drama of family therapy. In doing so, I put onto center stage all sorts of strangers in society, families of diversity, and their human predicaments--cultural issues that have been ignored, neglected, and discounted in family therapy. ... By narrating family stories and elaborating conceptual tools for cultural family therapy, I hope to demonstrate that when we meet people in cultural transition who face doors closing on them, we can help them open doors in their new worlds. And, as new experiences call for new descriptions, we need to imagine a new vocabulary for cultural predicaments that have been invisible to us. ... Cultural family therapy is a synthesis of family therapy and transcultural psychiatry ... As a result, I am addressing two kinds of readers: clinicians ... and students of culture ... Throughout ... I have woven over two dozen family "stories," varying from brief clinical vignettes ... to more detailed multigenerational narratives. Vincenzo DiNicola, M.D., is Chair, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and President of the Canadian Association for Social Psychiatry