Analytic Therapy with Refugees: Between Silence and Embodied Narratives

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide an overview of our experience in therapeutic work carried out in Italy with asylum seekers and refugees. A first part addresses more generally the question of refugees in Italy during the last five years – difficult times for national (and international) politics – also taking into account recent political and health challenges that are affecting the emotional atmosphere in the country. The second part deals more specifically with therapeutic work involving refugees, the fragmented stories of those who flee their homes and experience excruciating hardships along their journey as they search for a safer haven. Human beings carry along these almost Dantean circles first of all in their bodies, which are often marked by violence. They are bodies in which pain, abuse, anger, guilt, wounds and shame are inscribed; in the most severe cases, these bodies are even “dispossessed”, deprived of an agent. The uprooted and traumatized body is often the main vehicle for communicating very difficult, even unthinkable experiences in therapy. A “body to body” communication of sorts enables the patient to establish contact with the therapist, making it possible, through a long laborious process, to re-narrate and lend meaning to traumatic inhuman experiences. In our work we have observed how bodily experience, intra-psychic and interpersonal dynamics and the dynamics of large groups in political and social contexts are closely interconnected, and how this cross-cutting interconnection is crucial for psychotherapy.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees; psychic skin; dissociation; body; trauma
• testimony

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ According to data from the Italian Ministry of the Interior, between 2014 and 2019, the number of migrants who set foot in the country was 170,100 in 2014, 153,842 in 2015, peaking at 181,436 in 2016, 119,369 in 2017, then fell to 23,370 in 2018 and 11,471 in 2019, the lowest number recorded in recent years.

² We want to make it clear that we use diagnostic terms with a great deal of reservation, taking into account the limits they create but also that they facilitate communication among experts. As Beneduce (2010) argues, the term PTSD, besides its many limitations, also has the merit of strongly reintroducing the reality of the events at the origin of the trauma, their concrete historical occurrence. The limits, instead, deals with the power in general of the diagnosis that closes, labels, limits a suffering, losing the complexity of the subject and their culture (2010, p. 11; Papadopoulos, 2002, pp. 29-31).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monica Luci

Monica Luci, Ph.D., clinical psychologist, Jungian (IAAP) and relational psychoanalyst (IARPP), works in private practice in Rome. She collaborates with NGOs and institutions in the field of research and psychotherapy for vulnerable refugees, especially survivors of torture and war traumas, trafficked women and unaccompanied minors. She is the author, translator, and editor of publications on the themes of trauma, displacement, dissociation, sexuality, and gender. She is author of the monograph Torture, Psychoanalysis & Human Rights (Routledge, 2017).

Margarita Kahn

Margarita Kahn, Ph.D., has a degree in Psychology from Buenos Aires University, where she was born. She specializes in Systemic-Relational Psychotherapy, and is a member, professor and supervisor at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis, ISIPSè. She is an IARPP member. She works in a private practice with families, adults and migrants. She has presented papers about the specific problems regarding different types of migration in national and international psychoanalytical meetings and she published articles in scientific journals.