Migrazioni

From Trauma to Memory The “internal group” of origin and belonging in migrant children

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Abstract

The intertwining between identity and memory in young underage immigrants is examined through a series of sessions that took place in a Welcome Centre. In the specific situation that involves children occupied in a migratory transit, the construction of the individual memory finds itself engaged on two fronts, as it implies not only a (re)construction of the individual past but also the struggle for a position in an internal “group”. It is along these edges that migrant children find particular difficulties that can be deeply observed, underneath superficial levels of good “integration”, using relational and conceptual tools that are able to give back, also inside an ethnographic enquiry, the constitutive complexity of identity plots and their intimate bond with multiplicity ad alterity. A methodology of encounter where psychoanalytic listening intertwines with anthropological gazing. Migration calls inevitably and immediately into question the cultural constitution of the individual psyche that is critically discussed in the work and illustrated through striking life stories.The question of belonging and of the “origin” becomes, for the migrant children of the so-called second “generation”, an area of constant interrogation, because they have to rapidly face the necessity of building a sense of identity and belonging along Read more

Migrazioni

The median group as an transcultural device in treatment and formation Comparison between the Groupanalytical and the Ethnopsychoanalytical model

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Abstract

In this article the author compares the Groupanalytical model (in particular the Italian approach) and the Ethnopsychoanalytical model (in particular that developed in France by Tobie Nathan and Marie Rose Moro); moreover she compares two therapeutic devices: the median group for Group Analysis and Transcultural Consultation for Ethnopsychoanalysis. Beginning from these comparisons, the author argues that the median group may be an effective device in therapeutic contexts and also in transcultural training contexts, that is, in contexts where many levels of difference are involved: differences of countries of origin, of languages, of cultures, of professional communities, of institutional contexts (workers coming from different services). Consequently the median group is an effective instrument to work with foreign people, in the transcultural training of cultural mediators and with groups of workers belonging to different institutional and professional contexts. The author underlines, in particular, that the median group may better allow the manifestation and the expression of “otherness” and its utilisation as a therapeutic tool and an instrument for change by the construction of devices that permit expression and elaboration of the conflict and attainment of a level of dialogue between the different cultures involved. For this purpose, these median group devices have to be realized by building settings in which these differences may Read more

Migrazioni

Music, context and culture: the contribution of the ethnomusicological research in the field of music therapic research

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Abstract

This article looks into the relationship between musictherapy and ethnomusicology because, if the use of music for therapeutic aims is an antique, varied and diversified practice, then the actual practice of musictherapy is also incredibly varied and even if it has been established a more science-based autonomous discipline in the last 50 years (thanks for the contribution of the neuroscience, medicine and psychology…) not for this has it remained immune from its ancestral heritage. In fact, the therapy of music is based on the ’humanity of music’, that is on all that is universally human in music concerning the body, the mind, the soul and the emotions in a global point of view.

After a short overview and comparison of the two disciplines, a window is opened to F. Giannattasio’s splendid ethnomusicological research, which is of grand influence and richness of particulars, followed by things to ponder in the field of musictherapy and in particular on the role and value of context as cultural container to identify and deal with the forms of discomfort, disorders. Music in fact acquires therapeutic value only if it is put in a frame of references, that Read more

Migrazioni

Passing from Babel to Pentecost

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Abstract

Meeting in Babel: it’s the meeting taking place today with people for whom the spoken language is not about sharing, but a presumed barrier to communication, where a pain is found which doesn’t have the right to be thought about nor communicated. Where a Pentecost must be launched: a meeting where, as in the famous tale of the Acts of the Apostles, everybody can understand each other beyond different languages. The present article expands on a work published in the text Lavorare con il gruppo specializzato. Teoria e clinica, edited by M. Curi Novelli. The article addresses the issue of the therapy with a group of political refugees, focusing especially on language. The experience of being “emigrants” – having left their homeland – and “immigrants” – having arrived in a new land – arouses a question: in what language can all this be narrated?And what happens when a new linguistic code enters a pre-existing associative network?

Cultural mediators are important co-actors of our profession which, in the third millenium, has to face a large part of the population which doesn’t recognize our a role and doesn’t understand the aim of our work. They are afraid of us and we are the first to be Read more

Migrazioni

The theme of Nostalgia across the Thread Dreams

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Abstract

Story of a young migrant in a group of analytic psychotherapy carried out in a Mental Health Service.

The institutional context allows an original therapeutic setting that is not superimposable to others: the belonging to a public institution must be considered as a positive and powerful structural element in the institutional field.

The woman begins therapy with a serious anxious symptomatology of insomnia and the fear to be suffocated from whatever she swallows. The disorder began during a trip in her country of origin where she wanted to introduce her Read more

Migrazioni

Rejecting the foreigner as an institutional symptom and a specific defence modality within groups: A paradigmatic case

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Abstract

The paper presents what happened in Padua, after 14 years of peaceful cohabitation apparently without any conflicts in the same school building, between an elementary school and a CTP for adult education and development of literacy among foreigners. Such a paradigmatic event prompts us to discuss the concept of ethnic level of group mind functioning and illustrate how sometimes inter-ethnic conflict is a defensive modality in human group functioning, especially when an adequate institutional function is missing. Lastly, the adopted non-elaborative solution is discussed and possible analogies are made with what reported in recent contributions based on sophisticated Read more

Migrazioni

Parallel Lives and Intertwined Narrations. Identitary Paths Between Life History and Historical Processes

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Abstract

In this article the author reflects on how to textualize the life history of a Senegalese artist of a griot family (Badara Seck) who actually resides in Rome, without forcing the data into a different conception of being a person. First, there is an exploration of the nexus between the self’s conception, genealogy and history, which emerge from Badara’s words and which are widespread among some Wolof speakers. Second, the author approaches the life history and the genealogical narrative and constructs an organization of particular materials to reflect on the ways in which some historical processes- the changes Read more

Migrazioni

Presentation “Group and Migration”

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Abstract

In the introduction some fundamental ideas that are relative to the analysis of immigration processes and cultural exchange are illustrated according to psychoanalytic parameters. In addition, a new, in depth interpretation that suggests both points of connection and divergence between the different essays in the issue is given. This clarifies the central theme of the issue in a most detailed way. 

This issue of Funzione Gamma collects contributions which look at the wide-ranging, complex theme of the meeting-conflict theme from varying cultural backgrounds. Today, this takes shape mainly in the dynamic of the relationship between the immigrant and the host country. Above all given the increase of immigration-emigration flows as a result of the current process of globalisation. The general theme is well examined in Lorenzo d’Orsi’s essay which looks at the problems that have arisen from the recent situation that is connected to the social policies immigration. His approach is anthropological which takes on the forms of racism and marginalisation that make cultural difference a problem. His suggestion that allows us Read more

Migrazioni

The Time of Kali: Violence between Religious Groups in India

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Abstract

The author focuses on the theme of violence between Hindus and Muslims in India in great depth and detail. He conducts an analysis of the phenomena by integrating various points of view: religious, historical, social, economic and psychological. He closely examines the psychological reasons that are the base of the conflicting relationships between the two different religious groups and does so from a psychoanalytical angle. He lays out the projective and fantasmatic processes that define the image of Read more

Migrazioni

Goldfishes with a conscience divided into compartments

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Abstract

In 1974 Italy changed from being a country of emigrants to a country of immigrants. Thirty years on, immigrants are playing an ever more important role in the country. Facing the consequences of migratory phenomenon, the author seeks to show the relevance of an overall view that doesn’t lose the concreteness of specific references. In the essay I try to analyze the new items that were introduced by the «pacchetto sicurezza», where the question of immigrants stops being a collection of laws regarding migration and starts being a question of public security. Instead, the case study of Roma communities allows us to grasp the limits of the multicultural model and the drift of the process of ethnogenesis. Moreover, the author tries to illustrate the increasing role of the mass media, which is no longer a dependent variable but a co-builder of social reality, from such an analysis, no social science can escape. Finally, the consequences for “those who arrive in Italy” and for “those already in Italy” are understood from the perspective of the anthropology of violence: from the famous thesis by Hannah Arendt, to Read more

Migrazioni

A trans-cultural approach to clinical practice with migrants and their children in Europe and worldwide

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Abstract

To adapt our care devices to the migrants and to their children is a major challenge in the European society and in the current world where the migrations are varied, numerous and sometimes violent. This text presents a model of welcome and care based on the psychoanalytical clinic and on the anthropology, starting from individual stories and care’s narratives of migrants in Europe and refugees in Afghanistan. This hospitality is the major challenge in our clinical and Read more