Counselling is usually thought of as a time-limited form of help offered in situations of crisis. In this book, Giannakoulas and Fizzarotti Selvaggi extend the concept of counselling and focus their attention in particular on the quality of analytic listening which can be offered in brief interventions, whether for the purpose of diagnosis, intake or as therapeutic consultations. According to the view presented by the authors, counselling would not be defined by, or confined to, the external aspects of its technique, but would instead depend on the internal features of the analyst and of the therapeutic relationship.

For this reason, the frequency, the length and the psychopathological field of counselling, as different from other forms of intervention, are (deliberately, I suppose) not specified by the authors. Furthermore, the counselling setting is not thought