Davide Bruno

Giocare al teatro Nota clinica su un’esperienza di laboratorio teatrale con pazienti affette da DCA

Giocare al teatro Nota clinica su un’esperienza di laboratorio teatrale con pazienti affette da DCA - This essay aims to account for a biennal experience in a theatre workshop with female patients suffering from eating disorders, treated at the same time with group psycotherapy with an psycoanalytic orientation. Some clinical examples will be presented, in order to illustrate the group processes and the adopted methodology. Keywords: psycotherapy, theatre workshop, eating disorders.

Ghosts from the past: a clinical case study of intercultural therapy in contemporary Italy

In this work the authors aim to present a case study of intercultural therapy undertaken during a hospitalisation. Starting from a view of comprehension and de-centralisation of ones own cultural points of reference, typical of the complementarist method theorised by Georges Devereux, it highlights the relevance of the patients own theories concerning their suffering during the course of psychiatric treatment. The effort of the therapists in this context is to return to each migrant their own history and to reinstate their own specific life context, avoiding the attempt to fix the patients definition within nosographic categories or rigid models based on a priori assumptions. In this sense, the methodology employed by the ethno-therapist is not only suitable for patients belonging to cultures distant from ours, but it also becomes applicable for those who are local whenever, during the course of a therapy, specific cultural elements might emerge.

Bilingualism, Language Disorders and Intercultural Families in Contemporary Italy: Family Relations, Transmission of Language and Representations of Otherness.

This study aims to show how language disorders in children affect language transmission and the mixedness experience in intercultural families. To this end, it adopts a qualitative method of study based on the administration of ad hoc interviews to intercultural couples who consulted our Child Neuropsychiatry Service because of language disorders in their children. One of the main consequences, when the child of an intercultural couple presents a language disorder and a diagnostic process has to be initiated, may be interruption of the transmission of the second language, especially if it is the mother’s language. The decision to do this, which may be taken on the advice of teachers and health professionals, but also because the parents themselves often attribute their child’s language disorder to his bilingual condition, affects not only the relationship between the mother and her child, but also processes in the construction of parenthood and in the structuring of the child’s personality and the plurality of his affiliations. A clear understanding of how the dialectic between the categories of “alien” and “familiar” is managed in these contemporary families, which have to reckon with the condition of otherness, is crucial for psychiatrists and psychotherapists working in settings in which cultural difference is an issue to consider.

L’istituzione familiare tra mito e realtà

The family institution between myth and reality - This work takes into exam family as an institution starting with a vision of comprehension and decentralization, according to the complementaristic method by Gerges Devereux. Furthermore, examples taken from works in the ethnographic and trans-cultural psychotherapy field will be given, in order to better illustrate the discussed topics. It seems thus possible to conclude that family and parental forms are different (one from the other), and that an unambiguous and comprehensive definition is difficult. Efforts to understand and to find specific politics of reception are then required by clinician, educators and professionals who operate in the social field. Only this way differences won’t hurt anymore, and new generations will find their position in a broadened society. Key words: Trans-cultural psychiatry, anthropology, family, kinship.