1 INTRODUCTION Professors of Psychology well know that the most of their students start attending academic courses intending Psychology, and psychological work too, in a not much realistic and strongly idealizing way. This happens, on the one hand, due to an unsatisfactory knowledge of the subject, on the other hand because of a marked discrepancy between the representation/image of the psychologist as presented by media and the one which is shared by the scientific and professional community. According to the representation given by media, for example, anyone in possession of strong empathic and interpretational skills – to be simply strengthened through academic studies – may pursue the career of psychologist. The dramatic increase in popularity and consequently in registrations to Psychology courses in Italy is undoubtedly due to this naive, though extremely attractive representation made by media. Therefore, for example, those who think they have strong listening skills feel they are ‘authorized’ to follow this path. In contrast with this representation, it is a common belief that University should provide both theoretical and professional skills and tools for personal growth through active involvement in the learning process. This will substantially contribute to the construction of a realistic representation of professional identity, in line with personal inclinations and personality traits. In order to achieve such a objective, students should actively be involved through participation in interpersonal experiences which contribute to personal growth and develop a reflective approach towards their future profession (Corey, 2013; George & Cristiani, 1990; Human, 2008). Several scholars consider that group methods are very useful for the training of competent reflective practitioners (Knight, Sperling & Maltby, 2010; Nathan 2003; Nathan & Poulsen, 2004), and it is our belief that that middle and large group settings are particularly suitable to help individuals to understand the cultural roots of their representations of helping professions and how their internalization contributes to the construction of unrealistic images of the professional identity. 2 AIMS, METHOD AND HYPOTHESES This contribution describes the effectiveness of the experiential learning group (Parcover et al., 2006) – specifically for Psychology students – as a relational space which encourages reflection upon professional identity and the way it forms, with the purpose of constructing more realistic representations of their profession and participating in an intersubjective educational process of sense-making. Students are provided with an educational experience which significantly differs from a frontal lecture and where interpersonal confrontation leads them to explore different topics related to becoming a psychologist. A special focus is given to the maturation of their visions of the profession. The aim of this activity is to make students aware that their visions – mostly idealized and not entirely corresponding to reality – consider only a small part of the rich variety of aspects that characterize their future profession. A special attention has been devoted to the socio-genetic and cultural foundations of such visions that psychologists will have to cope with in their daily practice with clients/patients. Research has involved students from the course in Clinical Psychology, from the University of Palermo (Italy), in ‘groups of elaboration on professional identity’, semi-directive discussion groups oriented to associative communication, with the purpose of exploring the representations of the psychological profession Participants were divided into 5 groups, each of them meeting weekly, for a duration of 4 hours each plus a 30-minute break, for a total of 8 encounters. Each group consisted of 15 to 18 members plus a conductor and two silent observers as recorders. Before and after the group experience, students have been asked to write a text on their representation of the profession of psychologist, starting from the hint ‘Becoming a Psychologist’. Those texts have been the object of the study; a total of 176 texts were produced by 88 students. Analyses of the texts have been carried out using the software IRAMUTEQ (Ratinaud, 2009). It uses the classification method Alceste and is based on the research of similarities in texts. More specifically, in a text or in portions of it, it identifies the concurrent presence of the same graphic forms (words or lexems) (Kalampalikis, 2003; Kalampalikis & Moscovici, 2005). The purpose is to identify all those ‘lexical classes’ where some expressions occur more frequently and are therefore labelled as ‘typical’ of that portion of text. At first, a descriptive statistical analysis of texts has been carried out; then, they have been divided based on the groups that produced them and classified according to the descending hierarchical classification in order to group the terms occurred in the different thematic classes. The value χ² for terms indicates their strong /weak degree of belonging to a specific class and, therefore, to what extent every single graphic form contributes to the differentiation of classes. Moreover, new variables (namely, factors) have been identified by means of the Factorial Analysis of Correspondences (FAC). They briefly represent the information gained through the analysis of classes. Briefly, the aims of this study are as follows: H1. Before the group training, students are supposed to have an idealized and naive representation of the profession of psychologist, with very little awareness of the real aspects of the job. H2. Significant changes are expected to be produced after participation in group training, resulting in more realistic representations and increased awareness. 3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The corpus examined is made up of 10 sub-corpora of texts written before and after the group activities by participants from 5 groups. 4 lexical classes have been identified in the global corpus, representing different groups and their own specific and partially different linguistic features. It is possible to point out that there is a marked difference between texts produced before and after the group experience. This means that such experience has brought about some sort of ‘effect’ that has modified the representation participants have of their professional category. Through Factorial Analysis of Correspondences it is possible to observe the organization of thematic classes on a factorial plane: there is a first axis / factor referring to the bipolarity between growing as / being a psychologist and a second one referring to the possible contents of the experience / profession and to knowledge or ability. The vertical axis of the semantic space says that becoming a psychologist is a balance between growing (in that it is necessary to gain skills, such as knowledge and competence) and being (it is necessary to be a certain kind of person – in this way, ‘becoming’ is intended as ‘being’ with a social and institutional recognition). The horizontal axis, on the other hand, seems to describe a bipolarity referring to the possible contents of the experience / profession. It suggests that becoming a psychologist means being in charge of certain things. Specifically, there seems to be a difference between the left part, referring to ‘living’ – acting on the basis of one’s own and other people’s emotions – and the right part referring to ‘doing’ – acting on the basis of psychological knowledge of topics and objects of intervention. Moreover, it is possible to find all the texts produced before the experience in the right part of the factorial space, whereas all the ones produced after are in the left part of it, suggesting that the most significant change for students occurs on the horizontal axis, and is therefore related to the contents of their experience/profession. At the beginning of the educational experience, the profession of psychologist is thought to be referred to issues, knowledge and individuals, while later also experience, action and emotions are involved. The trend is from ‘being born’ as a psychologist to the acquisition of professional competence. As a result of the study, participants have developed a more realistic, less idealized representation of the role of a psychologist, and a greater awareness of the limits of an educational growth based solely on the acquisition of theoretical notions. They have also realized that an individual predisposition due to specific skills and abilities (such as sensitivity and/or empathy) is not enough to be a professional psychologist. Changes have been identified not only in participants’ professional sphere but also at a personal level. Originally, they thought that the effectiveness and value as a professional depended on the person; then, they realized that it is necessary to ‘become’ a psychologist through a specific education and personal maturation. Professional intervention itself, considered as a powerful means for the solution of problematic issues, has been accepted as a process that may be subject to limits and uncertainty. We can thence state that both hypotheses are confirmed, and we can assert the effectiveness of the carried out activities. Our study supports the need of reflective skills – to be sharpened through future experiences – which underlie the role of psychologist. Such skills are not acquirable through reading texts but through learning experiences which allow participants to know and confront with their own and other people’s representations of the profession.