PERSPECTIVES AND CLINICAL STANCES 

The clinical approach applied within transcultural contexts does not consider the individual outside of their relationships, genealogies, and cultural crossings. Every symptom is inscribed within a situated biography, within family and institutional dynamics, within migratory trajectories or symbolic sedimentations that speak through the body, language, silences, emotions, and the ritual forms of experience—past and present, individual and collective.

For this reason, our clinical practice does not work "on cultures," but rather within the space of meanings—an intermediate zone in which therapist and patient learn to translate and decipher one another's interpretive frameworks. It is a work of mediation more than of analysis: mediation between symbolic worlds, between norms and lived experience, between institutional expectations and intimate narratives, between what can be spoken and what emerges only in implicit form.

This perspective requires a stance of decentering, a form of listening that does not reduce the other's complexity to predetermined categories. The therapeutic relationship thus becomes a space for the co-construction of meaning, where difference is not an obstacle but a clinical resource capable of generating new interpretive possibilities. The goal is not to uniform but to make plurality productive: to welcome otherness without exoticizing it, to acknowledge cultural conflicts without transforming them into incompatibilities, to value the generative processes that arise when systems encounter one another.

Each session becomes a laboratory of meanings: a space where suffering can find new languages, where marginalized experiences can be recognized, and where frozen systems can open to transformative movement. Care does not arise from the imposition of models, but from reciprocal encounter, where listening, curiosity, and hospitality become essential tools for change.

Within this framework, it is by remaining in the relationship that the complexity of lives can be recognized and bridges can be built—together with patients—between the different forms of reality that inhabit collective experience.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF COMPLEXITY

Complexity is not a theoretical add-on to psychotherapeutic training. It is a mode of thinking that reshapes the way we look at clinical phenomena.

As the genealogies of complex thought teach us — from Bateson to the biological constructivism of Maturana and Varela, up to the historical-philosophical perspective of Bocchi and Ceruti — the mind is not a property of the individual but a network of relationships that is continuously being redrawn.

Therapy, consequently, is not an attempt to correct an error within the person, but a work on the dynamic coherence of systems: family, social contexts, linguistic practices, intergenerational histories, cultural affiliations.

From a training perspective, this means:

• suspending linear cause–effect explanations;
• accepting that every symptom is a contextual and relational message;
• considering the observer as part of the system being observed;
• recognizing the plurality of planes of reality — biological, emotional, linguistic, cultural, political.

The epistemology of complexity teaches that healing does not occur by changing people, but by transforming relationships and expanding the possibilities of the system.
For this reason, at ISST, complexity is not a topic — it is the method.

THE RELEVANCE OF SYSTEMIC THERAPIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Systemic therapy, born in the second half of the twentieth century as a response to the crisis of individualistic and intrapsychic models, is today more relevant than ever.
We live in an era marked by unstable networks, multiple identities, hybrid contexts, blended families, pervasive precarity, and continuous migration. Psychological suffering appears in new forms, often located at the intersection of personal, relational, cultural, institutional, and social dimensions.

In this landscape, the systemic approach offers a valuable compass. Its strength does not lie in a closed model, but in a way of seeing:

it does not seek blame, it seeks relationships;
it does not seek essences, it seeks processes;
it does not produce crystallized diagnoses, it opens hypotheses;
it does not heal by isolating, it heals by connecting;
it does not aim for normality, it aims for generative transformation.

In contemporary practice, systemic therapy is enriched by perspectives that broaden the clinical field:

• transcultural interpretation and the plurality of meanings;
• attention to bodily and preverbal dimensions of the relationship;
• the use of multilingual narratives and non-linear forms of communication;
• an awareness of the psychopathological effects of social, institutional, and political contexts;
• the integration of clinical practice with human rights ethics and social responsibility.

The contemporary relevance of systemic therapy lies in its ability to understand complexity without simplifying it, to respect the opacity of systems while simultaneously fostering transformative movement.
It does not offer rigid protocols, but a radical listening to living relationships.
It does not provide ready-made knowledge, but a way of questioning the therapeutic reality with curiosity, openness, and rigor.