AIST

AIST is a cultural-scientific and professional Association whose members are sociologists and scholars with sociological knowledge, established to promote the usage of sociologic practices and knowledge in fields, quoting from the statute, such as the “study, the research, the advice, the design, the analysis, the prevention, the empirical evaluation, the training and the action on the communicational tissue relating each person at every stage of his own development, aggregations, families, couples, groups, organizations and social institutions”.

In 1993 the "Laboratorio di Socioterapia" (Sociotherapy Laboratory) was born.

In 1996 the "Associazione Italiana di Socioterapia (AIST)" was founded.

The foundational idea of Sociotherapy is that individualism and subjectivity are two evolutionary phases of the psychic organization of people that are bound together by the historic succession of mass media.

Nowadays, thanks to the neo-media introduction, one would be confronted with an additional transition which could be the cause of hardships in building personal identities with consequential integrational issues: this could bring the weakest part of the population, as it was in past times, to be tormented with a whole new series of discomforts (medial diseases) when facing all the changes brought by the new technologies (drugs, inability to plan for the future, instantaneous identities etc.).

Hence the sociotherapeutic proposition which, by using the sociological knowledge as its main (although not unique) mean to operate on a person and its issues, both as an individual and as the holder for several roles (inside a family, a group, a working place, etc.). The cognitive specialization and (especially for our purposes) the usage of sociological means make the therapist able to rebuild the personal history to detect continuities, discontinuities and inability to build personal identities, in order to design an exit route from discomfort situations: "specialist help" (to design answers) vs "spontaneous remission" of the issues, that is the essence of sociotherapy.

AIST-promoted courses represent a moment of the helping action aimed at people showing some kind of discomfort that reaches a magnitude of spread typical of collective phenomena, like depression, phobias, panic or issues linked to those that are defined as addictions: cocaine, heroine, synthetic drugs, internet addiction, etc. At the very roots of the operational proposal, based on sociotherapy, lies the idea that people already concretely working in the social field (public services, social economy, volunteering) can learn a strategy that augments their knowledge with an additional theoretical dignity in the precise moment they practice them, presenting themselves as bearers of a specific kind of knowledge that works in parallel with the traditional approaches to discomfort situations.

Two are the directions called into question:

  • a theoretic one, that must bring foundation and comprehension to what is proposed, based on some of the main sociotherapeutic concepts;
  • a (really) practical one, which originates from the concrete experiences and situations brought by the same course partecipants or by the teacher, whose purpose is to focus on the methodological means useful in approaching the users since the very first contact.

AIST is inspired by some guidelines:

Teachers quality
Courses are teached by experts, trainers and lecturers. It is then guaranteed a continuous interchange between intervention, training and applied research, also thanks to the collaboration with the dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche e Sociali dell'Università degli Studi di Chieti-Pescara "G. D'Annunzio".
The central role of communicational relations
The Association activity is particularly focused on complex systems and the relational dynamics related to them. The new communicational systems and their ongoing evolution bring new meanings, making the decoding and sharing of personal experiences more difficult and generating challenges, uncertainty and instabily. Our proposal's foundation is to put the communicational tissue linking individuals, aggregations, groups and families as a perpetual subject of study, research, advice, analysis, prevention and empirical evaluation.
Institutional operations and contacts
AIST is a scientific research association that keeps in touch and cooperates on a research-operational basis with the most important scientific and professional associations of the same category - both national and international - and works on a variety of contexts offering advice, developing projects and operating with local authorities and social cooperatives.
Divulgation, conventions and seminars
The scientific debate, the sharing of experiences and their divulgation - both inside and outside the disciplinary boundary - are guaranteed by prospects of planning meetings, conventions and annual seminars both in Italy and outside of it, while keeping the reflection sensitive and updated on every phenomenon, being it new or in transformation.