The Foundational Thinking of the School

ISST – International School of Systemic Therapy is a Postgraduate School in Transcultural Systemic Psychotherapy, founded in Bergamo in 2024. In a world undergoing rapid transformation—marked by generational shifts, technological revolutions, globalization, migration, and profound social change—psychotherapy is called to renew its tools for understanding and intervention.

ISST responds to this challenge with a training program that integrates complexity theories, systemic clinical competencies, and anthropological and ethnographic practices. These elements are considered essential for understanding—and therefore effectively shaping—clinical and therapeutic interventions within contemporary contexts.

New ways of living, new visions of reality, new forms of distress, and new symptoms are emerging in a world that is constantly changing. From this perspective, every contemporary context is viewed through a transcultural lens and must be interpreted in its uniqueness: a ritual in sub-Saharan Africa, a family dynamic in a European city, alcohol abuse in a woman who wishes to have children at forty, the loneliness of a man laid off at fifty, the excessive use of cocaine by a forty-year-old manager, the trauma of a soldier returning from war.
Adolescence, in this sense, represents a prototypical transcultural context: alive, continuously evolving, situated in its historical moment, and characterized by a specificity of meaning that can never be universalized.

ISST positions itself as a cultural laboratory where psychological, philosophical, anthropological, medical, and legal knowledge converge and complement one another, shaping a deep and multifaceted clinical training path characterized by a strong social commitment. It is intended for those who wish to become psychotherapists with a broad epistemological outlook and the competences needed to understand and address the challenges of contemporary life. The School prepares professionals capable of offering effective solutions to the most current clinical issues, weaving together contemporary and future practices, both national and international.

In summary, ISST offers a training proposal designed to integrate—professionally and coherently—the clinical dimension, cultural openness, and social responsibility.