Books by "Luciano L'Abate"
8 books found
This provocative volume updates L' Abate's signature ideas, focusing in particular on the concepts of concreteness and specificity as basic tenets of evaluation and therapy. Noting society's growing familiarity with technology, current concerns about treatment accessibility, and widespread interest in wellness promotion, he argues for remote-writing exercises targeted to specific client issues and monitored by the clinician instead of relying on traditional talk-based therapy. This attention to concreteness and specificity in baseline evaluation, post-treatment evaluation, and follow-up, the author asserts, is central to making treatment replicable, less subject to impasses or missteps, and more professional, with the potential of changing how therapy is conducted as well as how clinicians are trained and practice. The book's framework includes rationales, models, empirical data, and examples of prescriptive remote-writing exercises. Featured in the coverage: Online interventions: here to stay and to grow. Verifiability in clinical psychology practices. Present status and future perspectives for personality and family assessment. Practice without theory/combining theory with practice. Toward a unifying framework of human relationships PIPES: Programmed Interactive Practice Exercise and Prescriptions. Concreteness and Specificity in Clinical Psychology will bring a new level of discussion and debate among clinical psychology practitioners and practicing psychotherapists in private practice and the public sector.
Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy as a Science
by Luciano L'Abate
2012 · Springer Science & Business Media
This book demonstrates how clinical psychology and psychotherapy practices may reach a scientific level provided they change the three basic paradigms that have controlled those practices in the last century. These three, now outdated, paradigms, are: (1) one-on-one (2) personal contacts (3) through talk. These paradigms have served well in the past but they are no less helpful in the current digitally focused world.
In his acclaimed book A Theory of Personality Development, Luciano L'Abate introduced a revolutionary theory of personality development and functioning that departed radically from traditional theories. In place of hypothetical traits existing in an empirical vacuum, Dr. L'Abate offered an image of observable interpersonal competencies functioning within the basic contexts of home, work, leisure, and the marketplace. Central to his theory was a developmental model that posited the family as the primordial setting in which propensities are formed and behavior patterns set. By defining personality in terms of the growth and interplay of interpersonal competencies, the L'Abate theory provided an epistemologically and empirically sound basis for understanding personality function and dysfunction as corollaries and extensions of one another. In The Self in the Family, Luciano L'Abate and Margaret Baggett again break new ground by expanding the L'Abate theory of personality development to encompass criminal and psychopathological behavior. Drawing upon mounting empirical evidence that the family paradigm is the major determinant of personality socialization throughout the life span, the authors develop a selfhood model with demonstrable links between the three domains of personality function, criminality, and psychopathology. With the help of the model, they show how it is now possible to arrive at a personality-based interpretation of most deviant behaviors, including criminality, psychopathology, addictions, and even psychosomatic illnesses, and they describe various preventive and psychotherapeutic applications for this expanded theory of family-based personality development. The authors further elaborate on the theories developed in Dr. L'Abate's previous books by introducing the core concepts of hurt—the basic feeling underlying much of personality functioning and dysfunctioning—and a continuum of likeness—the fundamental determinant of interpersonal choices and behavior in friendships, parent-child relations, and marital relations. Offering an empirically rigorous, developmentally based, unified field theory of personality function, criminality, and psychopathology, The Self in the Family is essential reading for developmental and clinical psychologists, family therapists, personality theorists, and criminality and psychopathology researchers. CHILD-CENTERED FAMILY THERAPY Lucille L. Andreozzi This book is the first complete introduction to the Child-Centered Structural Dynamic Therapy Model—a revolutionary, short-term treatment model which helps integrate child and family system development into a comprehensive framework for self-guided, family-initiated change. This guide, with its numerous case illustrations, works to build knowledge from within the family by engaging family members in structured activities that help them translate family system principles into practical, everyday reality. Child-Centered Family Therapy is an important resource for couples and family therapists, child psychologists, counselors, and social workers. 1996 (0-471-14858-X) 374 pp. TREATING THE CHANGING FAMILY Handling Normative and Unusual Events Edited by Michele Harway This inimitable book offers a broad-ranging, carefully integrated review of contemporary trends in family therapy, research, and practice. It reexamines the family and the many challenges to its function and provides practical advice for therapists who treat troubled families. It explores the impact that non-normative events such as violence and abuse, addiction, long-term and chronic illness, divorce, adoption, trauma, and many others can have on family function and provides proven intervention strategies and techniques for treating these families. With the special attention given to the structure, dynamics, and unique problems of families that do not fit the traditional mold, such as binuclear, single-parent, and gay and lesbian families, Treating the Changing Family is a valuable resource for all mental health professionals and families. 1995 (0-471-07905-7) 374 pp. Also in the Series: HANDBOOK OF RELATIONAL DIAGNOSIS AND DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY PATTERNS Florence W. Kaslow, Editor 1996 (0-471-08078-0) 592 pp.
Self-help is big business, but alas not a scienti c business. The estimated 10 billion—that’s with a “b”—spent each year on self-help in the United States is rarely guided by research or monitored by mental health professionals. Instead, marketing and metaphysics triumph. The more outrageous the “miraculous cure” and the “r- olutionary secret,” the better the sales. Of the 3,000 plus self-help books published each year, only a dozen contain controlled research documenting their effectiveness as stand-alone self-help. Of the 20,000 plus psychological and relationship web sites available on the Internet, only a couple hundred meet professional standards for accuracy and balance. Most, in fact, sell a commercial product. Pity the layperson, or for that matter, the practitioner, trying to navigate the self-help morass. We are bombarded with thousands of potential resources and c- tradictory advice. Should we seek wisdom in a self-help book, an online site, a 12-step group, an engaging autobiography, a treatment manual, an inspiring movie, or distance writing? Should we just do it, or just say no? Work toward change or accept what is? Love your inner child or grow out of your Peter Pan? I become confused and discouraged just contemplating the choices.
Four decades of contributions to personality theory and family practice have earned Luciano L’Abate a worldwide reputation for therapeutic insights. Now he expands on his pathbreaking relational theory of personality to apply it to the twenty-first-century family in all its configurations. Personality in Intimate Relationships showcases L’Abate’s trademark elegant style and provocative ideas in his most accessible work to date. Based on Axes I and II of the DSM-IV, the book describes relationships along a readily identifiable continuum ranging from optimal functionality to severe pathology, linking the author’s conceptual framework to specific diagnostic strategies, therapeutic interventions, and prevention programs. L’Abate’s theory not only integrates individual and family theories and seemingly disparate schools of thought, but is also inclusive of nontraditional relationships—grandparent/grandchild dyads, adoptive families, same-sex couples, and others—that are often left out of the family literature. Among the key areas explored in the book: • Selfhood and self-differentiation • Confrontation and sharing of hurt feelings • Negotiating, bargaining, and problem-solving • Dealing with distance and closeness • Intimacy and the ability to love In addition, the reader is referred to complementary online appendices that supply helpful questionnaires, workbooks, and ideas for further applications. Personality in Intimate Relationships offers fresh perspective to all frontline practitioners as well as investigators in this area. It is also ideal for graduate courses in abnormal psychology and personal development.
This monograph owes its origins to the decades-old proposal by David Bakan (1968) about the duality of human experience. He proposed that community and agency would be two necessary and sufficient constructs to classify and to encompass most human relationships. This dichotomy has been found to be valid by a variety of contributions over the last half a century (L’Abate, 2009; L’Abate, Cusinato, Maino, Colesso, & Scilletta, 2010). Additionally, the purpose of this book is to argue and assert that two important fields of psychology, family and personality psychologies, if not already dead are conceptually, empirically, and practically moribund. They are being superseded respectively by perhaps more appropriate, perhaps more specific, and more likely verifiable concepts and constructs, such as intimacy and identity. The traditional family still conceived as composed by two parents and two children of different gender is esponsible for only one fourth of all domiciles in USA. Singles, same-sex couples, and completely different family organization complete the remaining 100%. Difficulties in defining what is personality require a change in perspective and advance toward a comprehensive theory of human relationships that can and should fulfill requirements necessary to achieve an undoubtedly grandiose and ambitious universal status.
Relational Competence Theory
by Luciano L'Abate, Mario Cusinato, Eleonora Maino, Walter Colesso, Claudia Scilletta
2010 · Springer Science & Business Media
Relational competence—the set of traits that allow people to interact with each other effectively—enjoys a long history of being recorded, studied, and analyzed. Accordingly, Relational Competence Theory (RCT) complements theories that treat individuals’ personality and functioning individually by placing the individual into full family and social context. The ambitious volume Relational Competence Theory: Research and Mental Health Applications opens out the RCT literature with emphasis on its applicability to interventions, and updates the state of research on RCT, examining what is robust and verifiable both in the lab and the clinic. The authors begin with the conceptual and empirical bases for the theory, and sixteen models demonstrate the range of RCT concerns and their clinical relevance, including: - Socialization settings for relational competence. - The ability to control and regulate the self. - Relationship styles. - Intimacy and negotiation. - The use of practice exercises in prevention and treatment of pathology. - Appendices featuring the Relational Answers Questionnaire and other helpful tools. Relational Competence Theory both challenges and confirms much of what we know about the range of human relationships, and is important reading for researchers, scholars, and students in personality and social psychology, psychotherapy, and couple and family counseling.
Sourcebook of Interactive Practice Exercises in Mental Health
by Luciano L'Abate
2011 · Springer Science & Business Media
As a primary or an adjunct mental health therapy, written practice exercises have proven an effective, low-cost way for clients to transfer gains made in therapy to the challenges of daily life and relationships. These interactive workbooks expand on earlier self-help and distance writing methods along a continuum of healing approaches, from the proactive and preventive to the therapeutic and rehabilitative. But despite their appeal, large-scale access to high-quality materials hasn’t always been readily available—until now. The Sourcebook of Interactive Practice Exercises in Mental Health gives professionals a library of replicable, evidence-based, clinically robust protocols and workbooks for a broad range of clinical and non-clinical conditions, suitable for individuals, couples, and families. Luciano L’Abate places practice exercises in the context of current mental health and technological advances, offering guidelines for administration, helpful case studies, and caveats for those new to this type of intervention, and features a wealth of complete protocols in these major areas: psychological disorders from the DSM-IV, including depression, anxiety, phobias, and PTSD, couple and family concerns, from intimacy to domestic violence to children’s adjustment to divorce, lifelong learning: assertiveness, emotional competence, social skills, and more, family support skills: preparation for marriage, parenthood, and adoption ́, plus exercises derived from widely-used psychological tests (e.g., the Beck Depression Inventory, the MMPI), behavior lists, and others. Clinical psychologists, mental health professionals, and psychotherapists will find the Sourcebook of Interactive Practice Exercises in Mental Health a therapeutic treasure chest filled with new approaches to intractable issues or unreachable clients, new means of viewing typical problems, even new ways for talk therapy to work with words.