Der Fall Penelope

With their book Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile (1989) León and Rebeca Grinberg (1984) opened up a new clinical field, which had been neglected for a long time in the psychoanalytic community, although Freud’s plurilinguistic competence had greatly contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis. With their book The Babel of the Unconscious (1993; German edition in preparation) Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri and Jorge Canestri could confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to help plurilingual patients to integrate the different aspects of their self which are bound to their mother tongue and to their foreign tongue(s) and to thus allow them to develop a new identity. The author, who works as a psychoanalyst in Munich since 1999, works every day with his Italian patients in this new clinical field, i.e., in their common mother tongue and at the two levels of their old Italian and their new German identity. Through the detailed presentation of a clinical case he furthermore shows how on the one hand migration creates a new space in which therapy actually becomes possible, and on the other hand how not only therapy but the kind of relationship developed by the patients to their “new country” plays a decisive role in the whole process. Such a frame proved to be particularly good for the emergence, revisitation and reelaboration of a transgenerational trauma, around which the case of Penelope is also centered. The author further assumes that the theme “migration and identity” is becoming more and more important in our globalized world with clinical consequences whose elaboration requires a specific cultural and technical preparation.