6th European Congress of Existential Psychotherapy
ROME | MAY 21-23, 2025
Wisdom in Practice - From Existential Training to Therapeutic Encounter


Gignesthai on the Horizon of Existential Dialogue and Practice
The 6th European Congress for Existential Psychotherapy concluded on Friday, May 23, 2025, in Rome, leaving behind something deeper than lectures and presentations: it left vivid traces of experience, a sense of community, and an open engagement with the ever-relevant question of who we are as existential therapists today. From May 21 to 23, 2025, Rome had the pleasure of hosting the 6th European Congress for Existential Psychotherapy, titled “Wisdom in Practice – From Existential Training to Therapeutic Encounter.” It was a special moment for the existential community, where shared values met the creative diversity of methods, cultures, and therapeutic traditions, and where existential psychotherapy once again emerged brightly through the variety of practices and dialogue among therapists from across Europe and beyond.
Participating in a whirl of activity that celebrated the arrival of spring, in a circular choreography honoring the rhythms of nature and the renewal of existence, each person danced to their own rhythm, yet all together, in the common music of human existence.
Within this fertile polyphony, Gignesthai, the Hellenic Society for Existential Psychology, made a strong presence with its largest European-level participation in its twenty-year history. More than thirty individuals — students, members of our educational team, alumni, and former collaborators — joined their voices for three days in roundtables, workshops, research presentations, and creative dialogues, bringing the pulse of Greek existential thought and embodied practice to the heart of Italy. The topics explored included the relationship with the Self and the Other, identity confusion in the digital world, existential training, and the concept of therapeutic dialogue as a shared space in the search for meaning. Through an interactive and celebratory atmosphere, with abundant opportunities for deep exchange, presentations, meetings, posters, dialogue groups, and new collaborations emerging in the corridors and rooms of Rome, Gignesthai participated not merely as a presence but as a committed community, voice, and existentially engaged practice. Meetings emphasized the need for clarity, boundaries, effective and fruitful collaboration with psychiatry, and the integration of new tools without losing existential authenticity, making the congress an experience filled with invaluable moments: moments of emotion stemming from the core of existential thought, moments of authentic insight, moments of meeting points between discourse and experience. Moments of collective reflection with members of the wider existential community, moments of genuine sharing with familiar and unfamiliar faces, moments of creating a shared language — intangible yet alive, wishing to remain present, functional, and human. Ultimately, the congress promoted the very experience of encounter, participation, and reciprocity, walking hand in hand, face to face, toward a rich, complex, yet unified experience — alive and pulsing, just like existential psychotherapy itself.




