Analytic Therapy with Refugees: Between Silence and Embodied Narratives

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.