The
restless alliance between psychopathology and anthropology
( memories and reflections of an experience
on the field )
--When I arrived there, I knew almost anything neither of his history
nor of his present. However there I had started as young and inexperienced
psychiatrist.
--My
first impression was that of a place contained on him self, wrapped around an invisible,
monastic and claustrophobic secret.
--The
insufficient afternoon light and the first autumnal dense fog imposed
this feeling on the conscience, and they worried
it.
--The first impact,
the first vision reported from the persons who worked there
already and which would share with me this professional experience,
was that there wouldn't be much work: few the patients, common the
histories.
Everything would have been covered, during the winter, with a layer
of snow, initially light and thin, after hard like white concrete.
The city seemed to have anything to say to one coming from the external
world. While fleeting signs announced clearly that I had crossed
an invisible border, but certain, between what remains outside and
what, in this territory silent lay, contained by invisibles restrains.
--Later, much more lately,
a collective, merciless and firm work of deletion would come in
evidence. But what everybody tries
so hard, to delete?
Involved with emotion
in its tragic destiny all the country took part in the anguish which
didn't spared nobody.
--The authorities, the families,
the clergy and the politicians activated a bridge for the mourning
and the solidarity, in front of the most important tragedy of the
emigration in foreign country, until this moment, that this community
had to face.
--In the time when I worked,
wrote and marked research there (1982-1990) nobody referred
me about this event, whereas all knew my specific interest
for the migratory events.
--I was maintained
at side of all this. Even after years of permanence in
the territory, after having known hundreds of cases and emergent
events of the historical background of the emigration of mass.
--Immediately I justified
such a behaviour believing to recognize a manner of excluding me,
because external member of this intimate sphere, which crystallizes
inside a community struck by a collective tragedy.
--Then I reached the conviction
that this radical strategy of isolation
and repression of the drama was mostly addressed
to the members belonging of right to the community.
--The intolerance of the
event, therefore, wasn't to go up on the surface of the collective
consciousness, because it still didn't know how to file the problem
of the emigration like choice of survival.
--Besides, at a distance
of time, it couldn't be proposed to the attention of the younger
generations the history of this event, still dissuasive and threatening,
able to involve in the feeling of bad luck, not only the destiny
of an individual or a family, but that of a whole population.
--Salvatore
INGLESE:
doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist.
He achieved his own vocational training spending periods of study
and research in Italy and in the foreign country. Since years he
studies the psychic illness of the populations of migrants in Italy,
France, Switzerland and Canada, lend particular attention to the
existing relations between psychopathology and cultures of origin
of the patients (ethno psychiatry). On these topics he collaborates
with "Societa Italiana di Antropologia Medica", " Organizzazione
Interdisciplinare Sviluppo e Salute " and the laboratory of history
Dedalus. Author of many scientific publications in Italian, French
and English, affiliated at eminent national and international scientific
companies, he makes part of the Council of the Secretariat of the
Calabrian section of the Italian society of Psychiatry. Currently
he works near the service of the mental health of Catanzaro.
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