Dear friends and colleagues,

We are honored and pleased to invite you to the 11th European Association for Integrative Psychotherapy congress, organized with the Georgian International Academy for Mental Health and Integrative Psychotherapy. It will be a hybrid congress in which those who choose to attend live can also look forward to experiencing the beauty of Georgia and meet in person. The main themes of social responsibility, connection and diversity play an essential role in our current world. As humans, we face incredible challenges in dealing with significant ecological change, the threat of war and pandemics. We live in a world where people are fleeing violence or financial inequality—a world of fear, loneliness and social exploitation. We, as psychotherapists, have an essential task in this. How can we deal with a social, political, environmental, cultural and economic context that influences our psychotherapeutic work? How can we recognize the impact of this different dimension on the client-therapist relationship, and how can we develop ideas about how to manage this and integrate them into our therapeutic practice? With these questions and many more, we anticipate a three-day congress in which we will seek for answers, introduce new approaches, facilitate panels that discuss similar topics from

different angles, offer experiential workshops to put theory directly into practice, etc. Our congress will open dialogue between different approaches, in which integration plays an important key role. This will be a congress with a focus on relational approaches, which see connection in diversity as one of their core values. The fact that we live in a changing world, although it brings uncertainty, also offers hope and creative possibilities. I am convinced it will be a fruitful congress, and I look forward to meeting you there.

Dear friends, colleagues, my beloved people, I have had the pleasure and honor to be your host and to speak on behalf of the host country of the 11th International Congress of Integrative Psychotherapy. For us Georgians, as the old proverb says, “the guest is from God!”

Integrative psychotherapy as the dialogue platform between modalities in the beginning of the 21st century is ready to bear and process a very deep and multifaceted narrative: Human Rights, Connection and Diversity. It is symbolic that this is happening here, in Georgia, in a small, very beautiful country with an ancient culture that went through a lot of hardship throughout the centuries, in the country on the border of Eastern and Western civilizations which created its independent, unique pieces of art and left huge cultural heritage. Georgian civilization dates back 1.7 -1.8 mln years.

Connection and diversity between nations, languages, cultures, different scientific fields, valid psychotherapy approaches, different individuals, creates an universal unity and this ever-changing world requires quick and accurate response from us, and to realize this, the main human right: freedom of choice and individual will is required. 

We stand on the guard of mental health, on the guard of the proper functioning of those basic systems which are responsible for performing the main role for prosperous human life. Each psychotherapy session is a mini life scenario, which prepares an individual to perform his own life scenario. How to conduct it, and what will help us to implement a successful practice? How is professional fairness integrated in the therapeutic process itself? This is just a small list of questions that we will try to answer during our congress.

My dear colleagues, at the verge of the dialogue of countries, in Georgia, we are waiting for you for an intermodal dialogue.

Maia Begashvili

Academic head of the International Academy of Mental Health and Integrative Psychotherapy, national delegate of the European Association for Psychotherapy in Georgia