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The authors of this article, Freudian psychoanalysts in Italy, report on psychological and artistic experiments organized over three years to help recent migrants integrate into Italian culture and high schools. They note that war, poverty, and globalization have created enormous migration flows afflicting millions with a range of psychological challenges meriting some kind of intervention. These migration flows, however, have impacted some countries more than others; many European countries along the Mediterranean, such as Italy, have had to contend with the devastating effects of migration face on. The authors' experiments are thus praiseworthy given the severity of the problem and the existential distress that migrants can experience when they navigate disparate cultures.
The authors contend that migration is often a traumatic journey associated with loss and dislocation that is therefore amenable to psychoanalytic paradigms of wounding, object relations and play. By drawing on group psychoanalytic techniques embedded in psychodrama and popular music, they encouraged the migrants to express their psychological concerns and to create new bonds with native Italian students. The arguments in this article thus draw on several interdisciplinary strands of psychotherapy including traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, the tenets of group psychoanalysis, concepts from object relations, and the ideas of play and attachment theory. This eclecticism reflects the sophistication of its approach but can also become excessively prescriptive, sacrificing depth for breadth in such a compact space.
The idea that both adolescence and migration are transitional journeys is one of the principal arguments here. Migrants “struggle with a new body that they will have to narcissistically reinvest and symbolically” (p. 201) re-inhabit—just like adolescents who must adapt to new social realities and responsibilities. This tenuous situation also “brings the person into contact with unconscious