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

New York University, Albert Ellis Institute (USA)

Simone Cheli

St. John's University (Italy)

Lidia D. Abrams

Albert Ellis Institute (USA)

Marco Del Giudice

University of Trieste

Ray DiGiuseppe

St. John's University (USA)

Francesco Gazzillo

Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)

Cezar Giosan

University of Bucharest (Romania)

Daniel Glass

Sasco River Center (USA)

Antonella Ivaldi

SITCC, IARPP, SEPI (Italy)

Leif Kennair

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway)

Lucia Tombolini

ARPAS, SITCC, AIPA (Italy)

Registration and Abstract Submission