In the early seventies, later than in many other countries, behavior therapy began to be diffused throughout Italy. During this period, some psychiatrists from the University of Rome's psychiatric clinic pioneered this clinical-theoretical model in treating their neurotic patients. They then founded the Italian Association of Behavior Therapy (SITC) in 1972, which at first was only known locally. In 1977, the Italian Association of Behavior Analysis and Modification (AIAMC) was founded by clinicians and researchers from the Universities of Padova, Milan and Florence, among others. This association was involved more specifically with the study of behavior modification, not only in therapy but also in the classroom and in the rehabilitation of handicaped persons. Between 1975 and 1977, following the late diffusion of Ellis' work and the publications of Kanfer and Goldstein's, Beck's, and Meichenbaum's, the behavioral approach began to develop more in the cognitive-behavioral and cognitiverational directions. These innovations were adopted with enthusiasm in the SITC group because they constituted an attempt to broaden the associational paradigm in order to include some intrapsychic and subjective aspects (Guidano & Liotti, 1979). However, in just a few years this position was abandoned by the majority of those who had adopted and diffused it in Italian culture. This was because the above mentioned models, while enlarging the behavioral framework, still essentially maintained their original basic assumptions (Guidano & Reda, 1981). In the early 1980s, the clinical and theoretical points of view of the two Italian associations began to be clearly divided. Within the AIAMC the behavioral approach remained paramount, accompanied by the slow adoption of cognitivebehavioral proposals. This continued throughout the decade. In the SITC, which in 1981 changed its name to the Italian Association of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychotherapy (SITCC), research followed more along the line of clinical cognitivism. Following contacts with John Bowlby and Michael Mahoney, Vittorio Guidano and Giovanni Liotti published Cognitive Processes and Emotional Disorders in 1983. They proposed as a clinical model which radically abandoned both the associationism and objectivism typical of behaviorism as well as the conception of emotions as subproducts of cognition which was typical of the cognitiverational approach. Constructivism and Popper's critical rationalism became the theoretic and epistemologic bases on which the new psychotherapeutic approach was founded which considered the human being not as a passive recipient of environmental influences, but as an active constructor of his or her own experience and of a personal theory of the self and the world. This, along with the adoption of Bowlby's theory of attachment and the use of some of Piaget's concepts on cognitive development, provided the foundation for an evoluting paradigm of human knowledge. Based on the data gathered from the observation of 200 patients in psychotherapy, Guidano and Liotti (1983) described four models of knowledge organization found to be the most frequent and characteristic. In spite of the use of nosologic labels derived from traditional psychiatric terminology to define them (phobic, depressive, obsessive-compulsive, and eating disorders), the basic theory was that each model could be used to define any individual knowledge organization regardless of the presence of psychopathology. Only in the case in which the individual's organization triggered processes of decompensation in his or her own dynamic equilibrium could it be hypothesized that the specific symptomatology developed in the direction of the diagnostic label which defined it. Characteristics of the structural and hierarchical organization of the processes of knowledge underlying the emotional disturbances and problematic behavior patterns were defined for each organizational model and possible developmental patterns were analyzed, starting from the primitive experience of attachment and proceeding through the rest of life's experiences. …