Introduction

We are a group of psychotherapists, psychiatrists and psychologists who have been brought together by a common interest in promoting the study and practice of and research into the Constructivist approach to psychology and psychotherapy.

We share an interest in monitoring the development and progress of this school of knowledge, sharing an open professional dialogue which extends throughout different areas of our cultural and social life.

Constructivism in psychotherapy

Personalistic Constructivism is a non-dogmatic integrative model of contemporary psychology, continually updated with ongoing contributions from a wide rage of arts and social, natural and other science disciplines, such as philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, biology and the neurosciences.

This new model of self and personal identity, conceives the self as a unitary experiential flow that emerges in a world through the time and the identity as the historic configuration of this flow.  From this perspective, the use of the term "person" is to indicate the need of a new psychology for the 21st century, neither analytic nor explicative, but "personalistic", placing the center of study on the singular history of the person and its corporeal living nature.

It aims to understand the human experience not only by means of the isolated observation of the academic and scientific worlds, but also extends its horizons to embrace everyday cultural forms of subjectivity. It places special emphasis on the processes of shaping, stabilizing and changing personal identity and focuses chiefly upon the study of the building of narratives and of the symbolic articulation of experience, observable both in clinical environments and when expressed through literature, music, poetry, film and the visual and plastic arts in general.

The study of contemporary consciousness and the research of subjectivity bring out the basis for a psychotherapy presented from phenomenology and hermeneutics, where processes of critical reflection and consensual interpretation are the main instruments for the therapeutic analysis. Maintaining the scientific status for the study of human experience in "first-person perspective", this model builds a new alliance with objective phenomenology, neurosciences, cognitive sciences and medical sciences.

In this way, via different personal and social contexts, both academic and everyday, Personalistic Constructivism aims to understand the psychopathological phenomena observable in psychotherapy, and the treatment principles derived therefrom are applicable to a wide range of clinical conditions, ranging from psychosis and neurosis to the existential problems of normality.