Discourses in asylum seeking: An application of the Victim Diamond model to the Diciotti case

This research moves from two assumptions. First, refugees’ narratives, when they are spoken out, almost always, refer to and are in dialogue “with other society – shaping stories” (Shuman, 2012, p.140) which works as already familiar scripts, available to them to shape their experience. Second, among these available narratives, the refugee trauma discourse occupies a privileged position. By establishing a linear, causal-reductive relationship between external events and intrapsychic consequences, the trauma discourse gives for granted that all those who passed through painful occurrences will be traumatised, oversimplifying the complexity of asylum and undermining its political meaning. The refugee trauma discourse has, also, serious impact on refugees’ health because - by victimising individuals – their agency, resilience and their processes of self-healing are seriously prevented. Given the above, the aims of this research are threefold. First, showing that when talking about refugees, the actors cannot avoid playing the roles of to the victim, the persecutor, and the saviour, where refugees are positioned either as the victim - the traumatised refugee, or the persecutor – the refugee as a threat. I will suggest that Papadopoulos’ (2021) model of the Victim Diamond can account for the almost ‘inevitable’ enacting of this stereotyped pattern of behaviours. Second, to verify if and under what conditions alternative narratives might emerge. Third, to suggest that a method integrating Jungian analytical psychology to Foucauldian discursive analysis might help to deal with some of the issues left unresolved by Foucault as the role of individual agency, and the reason why some discourses are more likely to grip some individuals than others. To achieve my aims, I will focus on “il Caso Diciotti” (the Diciotti case) an event occurred in Italy in 2018 involving 177 refugees banned from disembarking by the Minister of Interior Matteo Salvini, after being rescued by the Italian patrol boat “Diciotti”.