From left to right: Simonetta Averna, Laura Bodin Dunn, Domenico A. Nesci, David Spiegel, at the Faculty Club, Stanford University, Palo Alto, 2016.
Courses
In 1992, Dr. Nesci created the Courses in Psycho-Oncology at the School of Medicine of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Rome, Italy. At the moment there are two Courses: a supervision group (where doctors, psychologists, social workers, general practitioners, nurses, and all kind of health professionals present their own clinical experiences in a Balint-like group) and a psychodrama group (where clinical experiences are role played and analyzed by a psychoanalyst and a group analyst). They are both very inexpensive (only 300 €), in order to promote training in this uneasy but socially valuable field. At the end of the Courses, all participants are invited to a workshop movies and dreams, one more invention by Dr. Nesci. It consists in a nightly screening of a cancer movie followed by a Guided Social Dreaming, the day after. It is a fascinating technique that allows all participants to share their dreams, induced by the movie, and shape an associative chain by linking them to scenes from the movie and clinical vignettes from their own professional experiences. This psychodynamic elaboration helps to overcome unconscious blocks and difficulties of health professionals in their work with cancer patients and their relatives. From these workshops, a television format was also envisioned by a Collaborator of Dr. Nesci and eight editions have been produced by RAISAT and IIPRTHP in the years 2000 on the themes of Psychoncology (directed by Vittoria Castagneto) and Prenatal Life (directed by Leopoldo Santovincenzo).
In 2002, Dr. Nesci created the “Scuola Internazionale di Psicoterapia nel Setting Istituzionale” (SIPSI) a 4-year-program in Psychotherapy that was approved by the Italian Department of Research and University (MIUR) and graduates licensed psychotherapists who can legally practice in Italy. The students of SIPSI follow cancer patients and their relatives at the Fondazione Policlinico Universitario “Agostino Gemelli” IRCCS, always supervised by Dr. Nesci and his international team.
In 2008, Dr. Nesci created a Master program in Psycho-Oncology that includes also Multimedia Psychotherapy and Online Psychotherapy, since cancer patients and their relatives often are unable to come personally to the hospital for their psychotherapy sessions. This Master program is organized by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, in collaboration with IIPRTHP and DREAMS onlus, a cooperative of SIPSI Alumni, in Rome.
Last year, a whole issue of the online scientific journal Doppio Sogno (whose papers are written by students and teachers of the Scuola Internazionale di Psicoterapia nel Setting Istituzionale) was published online on this topic and is freely downloadable.
In order to promote training in Multimedia Psychotherapy and Online Psychotherapy, other (very inexpensive) courses have been organized by Dr. Nesci, through a no profit association (The International Institute for Psychoanalytic Research and Training of Health Professionals – IIPRTHP) in collaboration with the Scuola Medica Ospedaliera della Regione Lazio (SMORL) and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, in Italy, in Italian.
English Courses on Multimedia Psychotherapy, Online Psychotherapy, and Psychoncology will be organized by Dr. Nesci and his team, abroad and/or online, hopefully in the future.
Research
In the aftermath of the tragic end of Peoples Temple, on November 18 1978, in the jungles of Guyana, Dr. Nesci dedicated himself to an ethnopsychoanalytic study of collective suicide, developing new theories on the origins of war, genocide, and collective suicide interpreting them as mourning rituals triggered by the increase in maternal death induced by the onset of the obstetrical dilemma (“La Notte Bianca” Armando Editore, 1991 “Revisiting Jonestown” Lexington Books, 2017). These new ideas have been then applied, in the Nineties, in a research on high risk pregnancies, within the field of Prenatal Psychology and Medicine. Recently, Dr. Nesci has been interviewed as an international expert for the scientific documentary “In Utero” (2016) directed by Kathleen Man Gyllenhaal.
An ethnopsychoanalytic approach had already been used by Dr. Nesci in his research in the field of Psychoncology. On this subject, he published more than 100 scientific papers and two books, in Italian.
From 2013, a research program is carried out at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, in Rome, on the outcome of Multimedia Psychotherapy in grief. Preliminary results have been presented at the IPA Congress, in Boston (2015) and at the Nordic Congress of Psychiatry, in Reykjavik (2018).
Working on grief and mourning, Dr. Nesci rivisited his previous studies on Peoples Temple and recently published a new interdisciplinary essay on cults, dedicated to the victims of Jonestown (the utopic community who extinguished itself in the jungles of Guyana). In this new book, Dr. Nesci was helped by his artist son, who edited 5 pictures from Peoples Temple’s files in order to promote, at a subliminal level, the working through of our collective grief. This last book (2017) by Dr. Nesci received a Foreword by Nancy McWilliams and was presented at the Grand Rounds of the Dpts. of Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA and Stanford University, in 2018.
After the publication of this interdisciplinary study of cults, Dr. Nesci was invited to become a member of the Research Unit in Psychology of Religion at the Dpt. of Religion of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy).
Hopefully, in 2020, another research program will be designed on hypnosis to help people to quit smoking, in collaboration with Prof. David Spiegel (Stanford University) an expert in Hypnosis and Psychoncology, using an app developed by him and translated in Italian by Dr. Nesci, for free.