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This book distinguishes itself from its harbingers (the expositions and compilations, for example, of Lo Verso, Peirone, Pirano and Venza, Marhaba and Armezzani, Rossati, and a few others) by the greater thoroughness of its information and by the scrupulousness of its research — research that took three years to complete.
The task, in all fairness, was not simply difficult but (absolutely) “impossible”. We all know that the very term “psychotherapy” is a “magician's hat”, capable of equating a well-meaning friend's “chin up!” with lengthy psychoanalytic treatment, hypnosis with the wise advice of a paterfamilias. We should not undervalue H.H. Strupp's definition, according to which psychotherapy is an interpersonal process that aims at the modification of such feelings, knowledge, information and behaviour as may have created difficulties for the person who seeks the assistance of an expert. All well and good. But what does “expert” mean? All the associations, all the centres that the well-meaning authors have taken into consideration (more than 500, incredible to relate) claim to be staffed by “experts”, to be capable of training “experts”…
Faced with this multitude of denominations and proposals, Filippeschi and Celano have adopted the only criterion possible: imperturbability, relata refero. Their objective therefore is not to exercise selection, nor to assess quality and/or reliability, which would in any case be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve; rather, it is to demonstrate broad divisions as discernible on epistemological, didactic and clinico-methodological grounds, to highlight the scientific assumptions that underlie diverse therapeutic methods and to report on