Migration And Trauma: Perspectives in Transactional Analysis

Autori: Vecchio Costanza

In this article the relations between migration, trauma and emerging of psychopathology is examined. The author presents contributions of some authors who use a transactional-analytic perspective, with a particular focus on the work of Marco Mazzetti (2008), who proposes the hypothesis of migration as trauma, and Jo Stuthridge (2006), who has hypothesized in traumatized patients a damage in the capacity of the Adult ego state to integrate experience in a narrative, which would lead to dissociation. A clinical case is discussed of an immigrant patient who presents with a first psychotic episode to an “Early Intervention in Psychosis” service in London, where the author works. Diagnostic hypothesis in terms of transactional analysis are proposed, including structural pathology and script messages.