fPc | The Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling |
18th April 2026 Lecture
Trauma, Body, Identity: bonds and fractures in migratory experience. A challenge for psychoanalytic work - Virginia De Micco
To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 18th April 2026, by Zoom. Attendance is free of charge for all FPC members and will count as 2 hours CPD. The lecture will not be recorded. To book a place please email admin@thefpc.org.uk
In the seminar the different levels and aspects of migratory traumas will be examined: starting from the uprooting situation, to transcultural conflicts and transgenerational fractures, from massive traumas due to violence and abuse to the daily traumatism due to prejudices and racist attitudes, passing through the highly emotional charge and need to reconstruct one’s own sense of identity, involving self- perception and belonging. Particularly the complexity of identification processes during migration will be examined through the depth of the relationships between psychic formation and cultural configurations, together with the consequences on primary relationships, on the mother's capacity for mirroring, crossed by a fundamental uncertainty regarding the possibility of affiliating her own child to her own group, as well as on the capacity to recognise the symbolic paternal function.
In migration real fractures in identification processes can occur. Children and adolescents belonging to second and third generations have to deal with an acute instability of their own symbolic-cultural referents and deep transgenerational fractures, whose repercussions are felt on the possibility of recognising oneself in a genealogy and in a belonging: one's own origin becomes a terrain of conflict and an enigmatic area to be deciphered. In situations of cultural fracture, precisely the possibility of mutual recognition between parents and children through the common reference to a symbolic guarantor represented by a common cultural order is threatened: the foundations of the narcissistic structure is at risk.
The place in which the conflicts, the ambivalences and, in general, the very ‘traces’ of the migrant experience unload themselves and coagulate at the highest degree is represented by the body: in many respects and in many ways in migrations the body is at the crossroad between cultural transformations and identity anxieties, facing renewed emergency drives, cross projections of unconscious phantasies and a substantial loss of the perception of biopsychosocial continuity of one’s own body. In migrations it is exactly this experience of continuity of the Self that is interrupted and disrupted forcing to retrace and rebuild often in a completely new way the entire subjective experience of one’s own corporeality. It is the entire area of primary symbolisation (Roussillon) that is revisited and if this operation fails, the migrant can suffer deep somatic disorganisations that translate into different degrees of psychosomatic disorders: the body that suffers due to an obscure but persistent malaise is the way in which the unresolved conflicts connected to migration are most frequently expressed.
In this work we will examine all the levels and aspects that the body carries in migration: memories of the past, traumatic traces, conflicts and questions about origins and belonging.
Particularly in women migrants the deepest traumatic traces often remain mute, literally walled up in the body, a body that becomes at the same time a monument and a document of untold losses and injuries. A place of extreme resilience on the one hand, where affects and memories unbearable by the mind are discharged and coagulated, but on the other hand, the place where the trauma will remain indelible and non-transformable. Even motherhood often become a mute experience for migrant women if they don’t find a valid mirroring function in the new context, where they don’t have their usual symbolic-cultural net, deeply influencing the primary relation mother-baby.
All this constitutes a real challenge to psychoanalytic work that will be discussed in the seminar.
Virginia De Micco is a Full Member and Training Analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), a member of the IPA Research Group Geographies of Psychoanalysis and of the IPA Committee on Humanitarian and a member of the EPF Group on “Psychoanalysis Migration and Cultural Identities”. She is the Chair of the group PER (Psicoanalisti Europei per i Rifugiati) of the Italian Society.
She worked in psychocultural field, particularly with migrants and refugees, with special attention to cultural differences, to the psychodynamics of racism and prejudice, to the anthropological transformations and their consequences on subjectivation processes, on mother-child relations and on the transgenerational aspects of traumas in migratory experience.
She wrote several articles in International Reviews, among them: Mutilations genitales féminines, in “Adolescence”, 2013, T.31 n.3, pp.723-741; Cultural ruptures, Identity ruptures. Growing up between two worlds, in L.Preta (eds), Carthographies of the Unconscious, 2017, Mimesis International; Migration: Surviving the inhumane, in “The Italian Psychoanalytical Annual”, Cortina Ed., Milano, 2018/12; The double body of the adolescent migrant, www.ept-fep-eu/eng/section/search-articles/year/2019; Esprits migrants, esprits adolescentes. Transitions, transformations, migrations: avancer sur le marges, « Revue Belgique de Psychanalyse », n.75, 2019. All collected now in the book Psychoanalytic work with migrants and refugees: Bonds and fractures among Identities and cultures, Routledge, London, 2026.