Migrants in Italy. The Silence. The Ambiguity.

I have been involved with migrants, and the problems linked to social traumas, for several years. I have attended international and national meetings and worked with groups of migrants and personnel who have interacted with these groups in Italy.

I believe that Psychoanalysis is a work of civilisation (De Rosa) and as a psychoanalyst, in order to do that, I feel the necessity not only to use know my experience but also to give images as a witness regarding these facts.

I feel a profound difficulty in speaking and writing on this topic. Each time, in my mind, a new white sheet presents itself as if there were nothing to say; as if a prohibition to talk reduces me to silence. I have observed that this is a difficulty that does not belong only to me, but it is common to many, also to us psychoanalysts. We talk among ourselves, but it is hard to bring our reflections into the open.

I have asked myself about the reasons for this and I think that it has to do with the psychic mechanisms that the problem activates and, I believe, this is linked to numerous factors. First of all, the problems that the migrants pose are deeply interconnected with historical, political, economic and social elements. This makes it all very complex and complicated. In particular, for psychoanalysis in Italy, this is a situation with which we have little familiarity. It doesn’t belong to us. Only recently our Institutions have started to talk about it. (Guarnieri) Some colleagues believe that psychoanalysis must occupy itself only with what happens in the consulting room.

In our country, we have been living a traumatic encounter with migration, a trauma which is often not even recognised as such. Maybe the roots of this refusal come from far away, from the history of our country, the refusal to recognise the racial problems that emerged during the fascist period and during WWII. It seems that some people still consider the Holocaust only a German problem and not ours. Only recently they have started talking about the deportation of Italian Jews, the racial laws, the escapes in order to save themselves.

The tendency to not see, to not tell the truth, concerning these facts, or to not give importance to them is maybe a transgenerational mechanism. (Kaes) I cannot believe that this element of not seeing or of putting aside what we see, is the behaviour which permits us to live today, in a country so deeply divided by these excruciating contradictions. At what price to our Psychic life? Talking about migrants places us, psychoanalysts, in an area where we cannot always use our usual tools of reading and dialogue; we need a different approach, we have to pay attention to what occurs outside of our studio, to the social life. The complication is linked to the relation with the historic fact and truth. (Campanile). As a psychoanalyst, I try to find this truth and try to find the link between the individual and the group.

This double outlook is necessary to give a sense and an image to things which otherwise would remain incomprehensible, but this is difficult to maintain, and maybe it explains, together with the contents we work with, the ease with which one tends to drop into silence. Defences are easily put into place like the split, the negation, the fragmentation of experiences.

Another aspect that emerges when looking at the problem of migrants is the enormous amount of silent violence which is practised on the “different” (outsider) who do not belong to our country, our language, our race. A violence that has generated and generates conflict not yet elaborated. It was and still is the cause of suffering, pain, shame, hate and a desire for revenge.

The violence blocks the mind and kills the thought. It does it above all to us psychoanalysts. The meetings, the discussions, the writings on migrants have existed and will continue to exist in our country, but each time it seems like we start from scratch. It is truly difficult to construct a thought, to give continuity to our reflections, to examine in-depth an aspect that emerges.

The violence that seizes us, the senselessness of our choices, the difficulty in understanding completely the mechanisms in which we are involved, are not only individual but also group and social, they make us look to the other side as if we couldn’t tolerate them.

Even though our country in the last 30 years has been the destination of numerous migrations, it is the boat migrants from Libya that have caused the traumatic event. Now, the coming onshore of the migrants has been blocked by the closing of the ports instituted by the government. It seems that the problem has been solved by simply eliminating it. However, we all know that this is not true. The migrations are not stopping. Migrants continue to die. If we have to deal with those that have already arrived here, we try to remove them from sight by deporting them into assembly centres. (Di Piazza)

We are deeply touched and frightened by the tragedy of so many deaths in the Mediterranean, by so many who drowned because they were not rescued, by the violence and the losses they had to endure during their travels through Africa. We become aware that our county is changing, coloured people walk in our streets, women wearing a hijab take their children to our schools, and we feel invaded and fear losing our sense of identity, of belonging to a country with a precise identity. For migrants, the tragedy is the journey they made and lived through, and even worse not being welcomed here, the loss of faith in humanity, the destruction of their dreams. For us, citizens and human beings, this is a trauma, we are overwhelmed and not ready to face it, we have had no time to give it a representation in our thoughts.

The Uncanny

In the essay “the Uncanny” (1919) Freud examines the thought of familiarity/non-familiarity and the presence of the Unheimlich in the psychic reality The experience of the Uncanny, he says, reemerges in all the situations where the unknown raises fear, a sense of strangeness, unknown and horror. He links this to the fear of what is foreign, strange and not familiar and thus scary and horrendous, in contrast to what is familiar, domestic and trusted, but he also affirms that it is “everything that should have remained secret, hidden and which instead has come to light “ (..)“because of the process of removal” (pg 102) So it is an ambivalent feeling. I think that it is typical in the relationship with the migrants and it sometimes becomes ambiguity (Bleger) Racism is linked with that and represents the attempt to solve the ambiguity by putting the evil into the Other (Davis).

Much has been written on social traumas, especially on the Holocaust, but also on Apartheid. (Arendt, Gobodo- Madikizela, Hook, Wabie, Montagner, Moss, Zaltman,). These studies have a lot to teach us about the problem of meeting with the migrants. They show us the mechanisms through which it is possible that a healthy and normal individual can abandon his own moral principles and transfer his own social and political choices. Massive pushes linked to the need of power of overcoming the greed of richness, of supremacy, entire populations have been forced to stain themselves with crimes against humanity and above all to deny that these crimes were happening next door.

The problems of the migration crisis in Italy and Europe now, in my opinion, bring us to consider the humanitarian tragedy of Europe and Africa in the last century. They both oblige us to recognise the removal and to face the crime against humanity(Zaltman), and we, therefore, do not want to acknowledge it and construct walls to hide it. The dehumanization has struck all, Jews, blacks, homosexuals and gipsies in the past, and now the immigrants.

Placing the other in the “non-human” category facilitates psychical movements which reinforce narcissism, both individual and social. It seems to give us a series of advantages and keeps at a distance the anxiety that the uncanny provokes. It does it through the exercise of domain in life, in the work environment, and in the sexuality.

The domain of our culture

Our being European and white has brought us through long-lived stories to trace a line to make us feel on the side of order and justices of true culture (Moss 2019). Now the immigrants have put this model of thinking into profound doubt. The statement that we are becoming a sterile country is true and terrible not only because we have less and less children, but maybe above all, because we are not able to dream of a future for them. The fear is that we will lose our language, our culture, the traditions, the religion, and the values. It is thus easy to fall back on a mechanism of splitting and projection of hate, the immigrants are the cause, above all the blacks so different from us, that lie in the other part of the world where injustice, disorder, chaos and lack of culture rule. In this ambivalent way we receive migrants into our refugee centres, but we stack them together as if they weren’t human beings. Also when we find them a place in our cities we impose on them our culture, our language, we even force them to learn our cooking recipes.

Work

Work is not only liking a creative activity, but often it is an obligation, unpleasant which disturbs our narcissism. During slavery, the back people were not supposed to be eliminated, as during Apartheid, but kept alive, even if in inhumane conditions, because they needed to be exploited, used as beasts. The goal was to ease the workload for the owner and give him free workforce or in the least at a very low cost. This is one of the strongest motivations on which racism is based. Italian businesses cannot find workers “our workers” willing to do hard labour: we need the migrants in the factories, in the fields, in the services. We make them do the worst jobs, we treat them in an inhuman way, we pay them barely enough to survive and then we judge them on their way of living.

A profound ambiguity also characterises the relation with the many “badanti”, people who take care of the elderly, who mainly come from eastern European countries. The supremacy of the master shows itself to them in the mortifying and demeaning attitude, this behaviour is further encouraged by the institutions which create great problems for these women, the same as for the black people coming from Libya, to obtain regular working permits. On the other hand, they allow them to live in close daily contact with the families and the person they assist, they give them the responsibility of taking care of the elderly and ill, which requires a profound intimacy, a personal knowledge and requires them to enter into a delicate affectionate atmosphere.

Sexuality

Another important aspect tied to the presence of the migrants regards sexuality. Having women available at a low price, supplies in an easy and comfortable way to beautiful sexual objects, black prosperous women, fascinating blonde Europeans. I have often observed the look of desire and contempt that follow the black women on the streets. The prostitute that stays in the other place, far away, yet at the same time so close by. It is a person on which one builds dreams and fantasies, full of emotion and passion. A sexual object desired but prohibited. Maybe so desired because it is prohibited. Also here the ambiguity is enormous. These are fantasies that with these foreigners can reach levels which otherwise are unobtainable. One time a patient told me….” try the black one doctor, it is a totally different thing!”

Testimony

The silence that occurs when speaking about the trauma of the migrants comes from the difficulty of looking at it and starting a process of elaboration which can only run parallel to taking on the common responsibility of finding solutions of a better life for us and for them.

I think that social problems, when not faced, come into the personal life of all people who belong to the same country. It happens in a silent way, through ideas and prejudices that circulate in the country. They belong to the individual, the interpersonal and the group. (Kaes) Social problems also come into the consulting room and the work of psychoanalysts. As I wrote at the beginning, I wish to give an idea of the experience I live with migrants. I think that this has to do with my personal relationship with them, but, also with my whole country. In this way, this is testimony also of the psychic life of the group I belong to. The elaboration of trauma of migration is a necessary process and we, as psychoanalysts are trying to find the way to do that. It goes through some phases, I believe that the first one is that of testimony, of recognising what happened and is still happening behind the next door. The function of witnessing is necessary for starting a process based on the interaction from the reality of the internal world and the reality of facts that happened in the concrete of the individual and the collective. (Weil) I think that our country in this moment is trying to recognise this.

Being a witness is very painful: it puts us in front of our characteristic regressive mechanism of ambiguity where the individual and the group get confused, where primitive contradictory behaviour stay together apparently without conflict. It is to be testimony of the violence and the silence.

Working through these regressive needs, seems to me, is the only possibility of coping with the fear, the illusion to dominate the different, and the internal racism in each of us. I feel testimony is a vital necessity for talking, for recognising the truth. It gets to link invisible things to images and words, to reconnect threads of history, to recover the bond with the elements which inspires horror, and that we refuse as not being part of us. It is full of pain and is this, I believe, that psychoanalysis could help us to see and to cope with.

Psychoanalysis has the means to bring to light what is feared, refused, removed. To favour the thought and break the silence.

References

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