Editorial

Abstract

As our readers may recall, on May 29, 30 and 31, 2009, the XXI National Congress of the Italian Society of Individual Psychology was held in Bari, Italy, on the theme "Strategies of Encouragement in Current Clinical and Educational Contexts."

The title of the Congress certainly evokes the many specifically Adlerian theoretical cores that (innovative and heretical for the time in which they were elaborated) constantly revolve around the intimate intersubjective, interindividual nature of man: social sense, social feeling, need for tenderness, empathy. In "Psychology of the Difficult Child," Alfred Adler writes: "There is no private intellect. An intellect of the individual. The intellect has a general value. It is developed by understanding others, by approaching one's fellow human beings, by identifying with them, by seeing with their eyes, by hearing with their ears, by feeling with their hearts." "If the therapeutic relationship observes Secondo Fassino in "Empathy and Strategies of Encouragement in the Process of Change" is the driving core of clinical intervention, the process of encouragement, in the peculiar individualpsychological sense, represents the heart of the therapeutic relationship".

The Adlerian "mind," therefore, is not an isolated mind, but contains within itself a very powerful relational vocation between the self and the other than self, in complete contrast to the Freudian epistemological position which, bound by the constraint of a "primary narcissism," evaluates external objects as "secondary" with the singular function of inhibiting, facilitating or serving as targets to the energetic discharge of the "primary libidinal drive." We cannot but note the far-sighted modernity of thought of Alfred Adler who, the progenitor of the sociocultural strand of depth psychology, first, at a crucial historical moment, imbued with Newton's causalistic physics, anticipated the holism and relativism of Einstein's quantum physics, popularizing particularly innovative concepts: cultural aggression, phenomenological subjectivism of fictions, relational mind, creative therapeutic couple, empathic encouragement process