Identity construction in migrant girls

Journal title RICERCA PSICOANALITICA
Author/s Marie Rose Moro
Publishing Year 2014 Issue 2014/2
Language Italian Pages 10 P. 91-100 File size 592 KB
DOI 10.3280/RPR2014-002006
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In this article the author, a psychiatrist expert in work with migrant children and their families, focuses on the issues posed by the body of second-generation immigrant girls. For adolescents the body is an essential means of communication and for these girls it becomes the chosen spot for expressing conflicts and distress that highlight the breakdown in meaning that is often found after the traumatic event of migration experienced by the whole family. This can lead to suicide attempts and pathologies expressed in the body such as self-cutting, scarification, permanent marking. With a trained eye and a double vision moving from the western psychiatric and psychological purview to a transcultural purview, through the consultation process carried out in the French institutions that she directed, the author describes the histories of two adolescent daughters of migrant parents whose pathway to identity entailed traumas and suffering expressed mainly through their body.

Keywords: Adolescence, migrant adolescents, transcultural consultation/clinic, ethnopsychiatry, body in adolescence, body marking.

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Marie Rose Moro, Costruzione identitaria nelle ragazze delle famiglie migranti in "RICERCA PSICOANALITICA" 2/2014, pp 91-100, DOI: 10.3280/RPR2014-002006