The history of humanity can also be seen as a history of ideas. Ideas, like peoples, cross time and space. Sometimes, like a karst river, they sink then reappear in another time, in another place. Ideas, from a Personal Constructivist Psychology perspective, are constructs that channelize our experience and are, at the same time, rooted in experience. Ideas are paths to follow, ways forward into the future. Cultural groups, like tribes, identify themselves with these paths, which occasionally intersect other paths, interweaving or not. The stories of these ideas can be narrated. Even constructivism, intended in a comprehensive way, in its various forms and names, could be seen as a long story, whose traces emerge here and there over time and space. This presentation is the attempt to tell this story, tracing its signs, the reoccurring, common questions and answers that have generated and characterized it, albeit in different historical periods and places. Further effort will be made to tell the story, entrenched in this wider story, of one of its “tribes,” Personal Construct Psychology, and trying to imagine its future.

Professionals who provide psychosocial services to refugees and asylum seekers in Italy are a population at high-risk of job stress and burnout. Located within competing demands from society, clients, changing work circumstances, and professional identities, they struggle to elaborate clear constructions of responsibility, power, and care. To gain a multilayered understanding of job experiences and stress, we ran two focus groups, which became moments of peer reflection and support for the participants. They discussed how their professional figure, allegiances to personal expectations, and professional demands were often at odds with each other, resulting in feelings of guilt, impotence, and mistrust in their jobs. The participants underscored the need to develop a sense of control at work and the challenge of dealing with evolving definitions of their profession and with scarce institutional support, resources, and recognition. The need for an (im)possible, shaky, and yet crucial balance between power and responsibility was further complicated by constructions of the Italian society as hostile or, at best, indifferent about their important social and human role.

How we perceive other cultures is arguably of increasing importance in contemporary society, impacting on realms such as international relations, business and tourism. The qualitative research reported in this paper was carried out in the UK and in Italy and adopted a Personal Construct Psychology approach. It aimed to explore intercultural perceptions in a sample of people who had some degree of experience with the ‘other’ culture, and a unique feature of the research is that it asked how those perceptions might be affected if people from both cultures are given access to each other's perceptions. There was considerable commonality in the perceptions of the English and Italian participants, and each culture envied some of the qualities of the other. However, they initially struggled to accommodate how they were seen by the other and endeavoured to resolve difference by construing at a more superordinate level. The findings also suggest that national identity is rooted in the construing of others’ constructions, achieved through relationship and comparison.

This article illustrates the state of the art for mental health counseling in Italy through a historic and postmodern perspective.The context of Italian mental health counseling is complex and full of new and old premises, events, and arguments. On the one side, the way counseling has developed and is perceived in Italy results from the intersection of old cultural legacies, such as Christianity, and new challenges, such as a multicultural and multiethnic society. On the other side, the development of mental health counseling in Italy is the result of the encounter between the pragmatic, optimist U.S. counseling and the phenomenological, hermeneutic traditions of European schools. The article ends with an exploration of the potentials that may arise from an ongoing communication between U.S. and Italian mental health professionals.

How we construe people in other cultures is arguably of increasing importance in contemporary society. The qualitative research reported in this chapter was carried out in the U.K. and in Italy and used a personal construct psychology approach to study intercultural perceptions of English and Italian participants. The research explored constructions of self and other in a sample of Italian and English participants; using a Perceiver-Element Grid (PEG) it additionally examined how participants responded when given access to the other's constructions. The findings suggest that a sense of national identity is relational and built upon social comparisons. Participants showed evidence of a degree of commonality and sociality in their construing, and when given access to the other's construing they used superordination to resolve apparent differences. This strategy is suggested as a possible means of increasing sociality.