The Ethno-Systemic Narrative Aproach
The narratives and stories are areas to explore for continuous rebirths and metamorphosis that, especially in migration, may be incomplete and painful (T. Nathan).
The inherent and forced transformations in migration processes undermine the psychic integrity of migrants; in this context the narrative fulfills its preventive and therapeutic function because it is able to introduce a movement in situations apparently blocked, repetitive and pathological.
A central question for systemic therapy asks which are the stories, among the many that are told, that deserve particular attention, how you can intervene in order to transform them? (U. Telfener).
Change the narratives means introducing a change in the premise that generate discomfort.
The ethnopsychiatry theory and technique (G. Devereux, T. Nathan) refer and emphasize the value of the narrative and stories of a biographical journey for their character of holding to suffering: they are tools to place and give order to events putting them within a meaningful constellation, that makes sense.
The ethnopsychiatry deals with the mental health of “others”, of migrants.
In the experience of migration especially forced migration, accompanied by traumatic events, the stories and the memory can be a good time to re-organize long-term projects and desires, often blocked or broken.
It's the practice of narrative that allows you to co-construct, together with the patient and the ethnopsychiatric group, the meaning of violence in the migration path, thus controlling the possible devastating effects and the repeated crises that don't find possibility of containment.
The practice of the story and the co-construction of meanings, provide the therapist and the migrant, the possibility of using the ritual as a device.
This device allows you to rethink the uprooting and the consequent trauma in the context of the narrative, rather than in isolation, favoring the restoration of an insight into the social and cultural world of people.
The mental health and the psyche of the migrant, gradually take advantage of the ability to make a consistent and probable story of self, taking into account the multiple connections of meaning that bind personal and cultural worlds, in the country of arrival and in the country of origin.
The narrative thus takes account of these multiple connections and definitions of reality, including visible and invisible worlds, rituals of the country of origin to place the patient in a position of advantage in respect of the host country and the migratory path.
In this exploration, the story allows you to meet eventual psychopathological accidents, alliances, fetish objects, etc..
Once these meetings are realized, it's possible to speak of "narrative therapy" where the meaning of the migration is created in the same story through the "narrativization" of the migration where the action of the subject takes form (subsequently, the cultural values and the social relations of the host country will place the individual and his personal migration path within the local ethical references).
This approach takes into account the contamination between Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Ethnology, Clinical Psychology.
The ethno-systemic narrative approach (N. Losi) is a development and a specification of the systemic-relational therapy
The School will provide the tools to distinguish the vital narratives, generated by migrant status, from the stereotyped narratives; these latter while revealing the widespread need for identification in a narrative structure, they only lead to regressive isolation.
This distinction is crucial to understand the two "narrative realities" with opposite purposes: on the one hand, the proliferation of "storytelling", ie the use of stories for advertising to elicit the consent to consume or to certain political ideas; on the other, narratives led by a push release, that is, those relative and relational 'narrative acts' driven by authenticity, which open to the complexity rather than reduce it and allow greater degrees of freedom with respect to the constraints that ensnares the desire of others.
Differentiating the instrumental narratives, that restrict the space of freedom, imagination and thought, from those liberating and creative ones, rich of meaning, requires a careful work.
Even the attachment to the own 'story' and a vindictive look inherent in many dynamics of identification, can in turn 'close' a story rather than open it up to an experience more full of life.
The ethno-systemic narrative approach aims to reveal these contradictions and to open towards healing stories, able to deal them.