EVOLUTION IN PSYCHOTHERAPY: CURRENT APPROACHES AND NEW DIRECTIONS


April 14-18, 2026
Erice, Sicily, ITALY


Workshop Organizers

Conference goals

Marco Del Giudice (University of Trieste, Italy)

Purpose of the Workshop

Conference goals

For more than 30 years, evolutionary psychology has been shedding light on human nature and on the functioning and development of the mind/brain. The levels of understanding afforded by evolutionary theory are also extremely helpful for making sense of dysfunctional behavior, psychological suffering, and the vulnerability to mental disorders broadly conceived. However, the field of psychotherapy has been slow to integrate these insights, and mainstream clinical approaches remain largely or completely insulated from modern evolutionary psychology. On this background, clinicians from various perspectives have made pioneering attempts to apply evolutionary models to the conceptualization and treatment of psychopathology, as well as to the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship itself. As a result, more therapists are starting to adopt some evolutionarily-informed ideas and practices in their work—but, in many cases, those ideas and practices remain limited in scope and fail to add up to a coherent clinical framework. The same is true at a higher level of analysis: different evolutionary approaches to psychotherapy tend to focus on specific models and subsets of concepts, often with little connection to what goes on in other approaches and in the wider world of evolutionary psychology and psychopathology. This workshop aims to take a significant step toward integration by bringing together clinicians from a variety of evolutionarily-informed perspectives, both cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic. The goals are to facilitate a deep and constructive dialogue between approaches, make therapists aware of mutually relevant contributions, raise novel questions, and suggest new ideas to explore in the future. In addition to the talks by keynote speakers, there will be short talks by workshop participants, discussion roundtables, and a poster session. While the workshop will have a clinical focus, several of the speakers also have considerable research experience, and there will be room to discuss the interplay between research and practical applications. If you are already applying evolutionary concepts in your clinical practice, think you would benefit from doing so, or are simply curious—you cannot miss this opportunity!

Speakers & Topics

Mike Abrams

Reimagining Psychotherapy: Evolution, Genetics, and the Next Generation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Simone Cheli

Framing an ecological turn in psychotherapy: towards a radically interpersonal model of life history and clinical staging

Lidia D. Abrams

The meaning of menopause: Implications for treatment

Marco Del Giudice

The future of evolutionary approaches to psychotherapy: convergence, diversification, and outstanding questions

Ray DiGiuseppe

Quick to anger, slow to recover: an evolutionary model of anger treatment

Rosario Esposito

Trait interpersonal motivational systems and psychopathological dimensions

Francesco Gazzillo

The adaptive nature of unconscious functioning and basic motivations

Cezar Giosan

Cognitive Evolutionary Therapy for Depression – protocol, effectiveness, challenges

Daniel Glass

Integrating evolutionary theory with contemporary evidence-based psychotherapy

Antonella Ivaldi

The Relational/Multi-Motivational Therapeutic Approach (RE.MO.T.A.): an integrative and comparative approach combining relational clinical knowing and motivational systems theories

Leif Kennair

Is sustained negative emotional processing adaptive?

Lucia Tombolini

Interpersonal motivational systems in attachment-informed therapy

Registration and Abstract Submission