Broken dreams – Dreams in transit: narrative transformation of the “ignorant emotions” of adolescents
Abstract
The paper describes how the group with adolescents can provide a relational space where to express and transform by means of narration the emotions that are almost always ignored and most of the time ignorant (meaning that they cannot be told) of kids attending a school with a high drop out rate in the suburbs of Rome. The narrative plot is identified, within the framework of the group of adolescents, as a sensor regulating the possibility of making sense of ignorant-ignored feelings and conveying them to the group of peers and the adult world. The narrative transformations, which have a very high therapeutic value, of the ignorant emotions related to the transforming dream of Silvio, an adolescent belonging to a group conducted in a school (the dream being to become a soccer player), are compared with those of the broken dreams of the leading characters of two works by a young Italian writer, Andrea Carraro: Tonino in the novel L’Erba Cattiva, and Germano in the short story L’Altalena.