Call for paper - Special Issues

Clinical psychology's contribution to understanding social transformations and developing models of democratic coexistence has, in the past, suffered from the founding myth of the discipline, whose psychological setting has been focused on the individual psychic dimension.
Reflection on the analysis of life contexts and intervention for social change now widely recognizes that the theoretical principles of clinical intervention are equally foundational to the analysis and intervention of organizational and collective contexts (Mannarini & Arcidiacono, 2021) and that social change takes place through layered and multilevel settings, from properly clinical settings to community settings (Varveri & Lavanco, 2008). The construction of cultural meanings of civic experience takes place, properly, in the forms of coexistence with the other and posits a shared structure of interactions among individuals and between individuals and institutions, actively contributing to shaping the meanings of interpersonal psychic experience.
Thus, to accompany social change that ensures responsible coexistence and psychological well-being, we need to act at the individual and collective levels, combining together the psychic and social dimensions (Arcidiacono et al., 2022).
This means promoting models that enable us to construct – or de-construct – interpretations of the social world and contextually co-design solutions to the real-life problems that those same interpretations contribute to create. In dealing with the clinic of democracy, we cannot therefore disregard our experience of relationships in the outside world and their organized political form.
In this theoretical framework, when faced with conditions adverse to the exercise of democracy, processes that revitalize connective well-being among populations (Novara & Varveri, 2015), trust in the politics of rights and civic coexistence become important. The system of shared rules is one to which each citizen contributes with a signification of reality in which otherness is the ordering and affective principle of acting "with and among" others (Salvatore et al., 2019).
Thanks to associationism, movements created from buttom-up and experiences of participatory democracy in community development programs, the individual produces democracy to the extent that he or she puts into the field a complexity of the real and its possible narratives that would otherwise remain unresolved – in chaos or in the rigidity of an absolute order – if there were no way to process it democratically (ivi).
In this sense, contributing to collective life in a democratic method includes processes of negotiation between even conflicting instances, needs, desires and, even before that, between divergent worldviews, since the more democratic the system, the more it requires the governance of complexity that is proper to it.

Key Questions: What contribution can psychology, and in this regard clinical psychology, give to the construction and development of democracies? What can psychology say about conflict and plurality management and about the possibility of experiencing oneself as an active citizen? Has the representation and
sharing of democratic values changed in youth generations? (Foa & Mounk, 2016). How can psychology reconcile the need for personal safety and the need to belong to a multifaceted community? How can it accord the inviolability of rights, of the individual and of communities, with the multiplicity of a 'quasi-stationary' process such as democratic discourse? What the relationship between democracy and health?
To these and similar questions the issue of the Review seeks to provide arguments and propose methods, rather than solutions, for understanding how to activate, stay and remain in the democratic process, which by its very nature cannot be exhausted in a one-size-fits-all response.

Relevance of the topic
Taking care of community bonds should be done preventively, in peacetime, but it becomes urgent in times of war between peoples, remembering, as Freud wrote, those "limitations [...] that form what we call the right of the population" (Freud, 1915, p. 16) and that through dialogical elaboration, proper to the democratic process, make possible the social bond with the Other.
Democracy as a permanent creative act (Alberti, 2018, p. 62), in which the socio-affective bond between citizens is renewed, within a trusting collective conversation, is a challenge in which we believe psychological science can make a relevant contribution.

Kind of contributions
Theoretical and methodological discussions as well as empirical studies providing psychological analysis of democracy, its trends, and practices as well as at clarifying the role of psychology and clinical psychology in promoting democracy are welcome.

Deadline: Authors wishing to participate are invited to send an abstract (Max 500 words) by 29 February 2024 to rivistapsicologiaclinica@gmail.com and cinzia.novara@unipa.it

The deadline for submitting full papers will be on the 30th of June 2024.