Psychological Care for Cancer Patients: New Perspectives on Training Health Professionals is an innovative work in psychosocial oncology which examines the role of creative expression in the psychological treatment of cancer patients. After having spent five decades in this field, Domenico Arturo Nesci has become a proponent of treatment that values patients as creatives and valiant fighters rather than objects of an ambivalent compassion. This book analyzes this intersection of psychology, the humanities, medicine, and social work through scholarship conceived to help all people whose lives are crossed by cancer: patients, relatives, caregivers, health professionals, and students.

Revisiting Jonestown covers three main topics: the psycho-biography of Jim Jones (the leader of the suicidal community) from the new perspective of Prenatal Psychology and transgenerational trauma, the story of his Peoples Temple, with emphasis on what kind of leadership and membership were responsible for their tragic end, and the interpretation of death rituals by religious cults as regression to primordial stages of human evolution, when a series of genetic mutations changed the destiny of Homo Sapiens, at the dawn of religion and human awareness. A pattern of collective suicide is finally identified, making it possible to foresee and try to prevent its tragic repetition. At the same time, through an artistic editorial work on original images from the Peoples Temple files, a sort of Multimedia Psychotherapy is subliminally delivered in order to help the mourning of the victims of Jonestown, to whose memory the book is dedicated.

Multimedia Psychotherapy is a new technique that helps patients to mourn and overcome loss and grief experiences as well as blocks and inhibitions in the life cycle. The method can be easily summarized in 5 steps: the intake (where the therapist explains the technique to the patient), the "picture sessions" (where the patient, helped by his/her own family, brings in pictures and works them through freely associating with memories and emotions evoked by the images), the "music session" (during which a song or music is chosen by the patient in order to become the soundtrack of the "psychodynamic montage" which a multimedia artist, who collaborates with the therapist, will produce and then give back to the therapist), the "screening session" (where patient and therapist watch, comment, and elaborate the video together), and the outcome. Although this psychotherapeutic technique is rooted in a psychodynamic approach, it can be applied and integrated within any form of psychotherapy. Multimedia Psychotherapy is conceived as a manual in order to let all health professionals who work as psychotherapists to learn the new technique and apply it with their own patients. Excerpts from sessions are quoted to describe each step of the therapy. At the same time, two theoretical chapters are devoted to explain how and why the "memory objects" created by the multimedia artist are so effective in helping patients to mourn their complicated grief and/or overcome their blocks or inhibitions in normal development. Finally a new supervision model (the Clinic and Dreams Workshop) is described as well as a training group experience, once again through excerpts of such new teaching seminars. The book is written as a "story" in the format of "narrative medicine." It ends opening new horizons: how to use Multimedia Psychotherapy to make "memory objects for the future," during pregnancy and prenatal life, or to help Alzheimer patients not to lose their capacity to recognize their own relatives.

Revisiting Jonestown covers three main topics: the psycho-biography of Jim Jones (the leader of the suicidal community) from the new perspective of Prenatal Psychology and transgenerational trauma, the story of his Peoples Temple, with emphasis on what kind of leadership and membership were responsible for their tragic end, and the interpretation of death rituals by religious cults as regression to primordial stages of human evolution, when a series of genetic mutations changed the destiny of Homo Sapiens, at the dawn of religion and human awareness. A pattern of collective suicide is finally identified, making it possible to foresee and try to prevent its tragic repetition. At the same time, through an artistic editorial work on original images from the Peoples Temple files, a sort of Multimedia Psychotherapy is subliminally delivered in order to help the mourning of the victims of Jonestown, to whose memory the book is dedicated.