An advantage of globalisation: Working with Italian patients abroad in their mother language

Abstract

Since 1999, the author has been working as a psychoanalyst in Munich, Germany, in the context of the German National Health Service, which covers psychoanalytic psychotherapy of up to 300 sessions with a frequency of up to three times a week. He has mostly been working with Italian patients in their common mother language. In other words, globalisation has made it possible to help patients heal the wounds of their old Italian self, develop a new German self, integrate them with each other, and thus allow foreign patients to become “citizens of the world.” After presenting the context of his clinical work, including the German Kassensystem and the characteristics of the Italian patients he works with, the author provides the reader with a review of the literature on migration and identity from a psychoanalytic point of view. Sociology and literature also offer an important key to the understanding of his patients. At this point in the paper, the author presents three patients, their history, the background of their migration to Germany, and the work he did with them. This allows him to come to the conclusion that psychoanalysis can help patients actualise the potentialities intrinsic in globalisation, in order to move towards a richer and more sophisticated identity.

Keywords:

• globalisation
• migration
• mother tongue
• international identity

Notes

^*Before being given in its present form at the XVth Forum of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS), held in Santiago de Chile, October 15–18, 2008, under the title “Identity and globalisation. New challenges for psychoanalysis,” parts of this paper had been given at: the Joint Meeting between OPIFER and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry held in Florence, November 10–12, 2006, under the title “A normal happiness”; the Monthly Meeting of the Munich Group of the German Psychoanalytic Society held in Munich on December 20, 2006; the International Meeting of the International Association of Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis held in Athens, July 5–8, 2007, under the title “Metamorphosis. Therapeutic change in a changing world”; and the Annual Congress of the German Psychoanalytic Society, held in Munich on May 22–25, 2008, under the title “Psychoanalyse und Globalisierung.”