The XVIIIth International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology was held on the island of San Servolo near Venice, Italy from July 20th-July 24th2009. The main theme of the Congress was “PCP and constructivism as a way of working, learning and living.”

Besides allowing participants to exchange ideas with their colleagues as always happens with gatherings of this nature, the choice of main theme underlining wide range of theory use in different sectors of professional work contributed in making San Servolo truly an exciting place for experimentation. Attending the Congress in Venice was an excellent opportunity to get familiar with the way of thinking and pracitsing of constructivists from Germany, New Zealand, USA, Turkey, Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, Australia, Mexico, Chec Republic, Ireland, Japan, Canada, Ukraine and Italy.

Congress was opened with two workshops. With Introduction into the Psychology of Personal Constructs Trevor Butt opened a dialog with the attendees about the basic dilemma- how can a psychologist who’s a constructivist construe human behavior without using classical concepts of cognition, emotion, motivation and unconsious. Professor Dusan Stojnov in his workshop Spying of Self presented different approaches to self in psychology and psychotherapy, emphasizing the pioneering contribution of G. Kelly and PCP approach to self. The author presented a new method – Constructivist rologram that he formulated himself with the goal of analyzing the role of one person in different societal contexts.

Congress included various experience based workshops, as well as presentations of theoretical and empirical works and further researches of possible contexts for implementing all kinds of Grids.

Plenarie meetings had a purpose of investigating future of methodes in PCP (T. Butt and V. Burr), attempted to construct an answer PCP has to offer to current challanges to globalization (J. Scheer, B. Warren, L . Thomson), questioned PCP contribution to sexuality (D. Winter, M. Cross, K. Dell Aversano, K. Suel), marked possible directions of developing PLK in the future (B. Warren, S. Watson, D. Stojnov), and at the end gave importance to the idea of how we as a group of participants would construct a congress (M. Frances).

From many inspirational themes I would like to point out the presentation of Portugese constructivists E. Riberiro, J. Senra, J. Maurao, A. Borges, T. Freire-Implicative dilemmas, the birthplace and psychoterapeutical solutions, as well as the educational – experiencal workshop of P. Cummins, and D. Pekkala with the theme of new possibilities of using genogramme in a constructivist way with the goal of researching family constructs, than inportant methafores in working with phobias and eating disorders that were mentioned by different verious autors.