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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]