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With their book Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile (1989), L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg (1984) opened up a new clinical field, which had been neglected for a long time in the psychoanalytic community, although Freud’s multilinguistic competence had greatly contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis. With their book The Babel of the unconscious, Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri were able to confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to help multilingual patients to integrate the different aspects of their self which are bound to their mother tongue and to their foreign tongue(s), and thus to allow them to develop a new identity. The author, who has been a psychoanalyst in Munich since 1999, works every day with his Italian patients in this new clinical field, that is 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, the migration creates a new space in which therapy actually becomes possible, and on the other hand, not only therapy, but also 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 the transgenerational trauma around which the case of Penelope is centered. The author further assumes that the theme of >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.
Since 1999, the author has been working as a psychoanalyst in Munich, Germany, in the context of the German National Health Service, which covers psychoanalytic psychotherapy of up to 300 sessions with a frequency of up to three times a week. He has mostly been working with Italian patients in their common mother language. In other words, globalisation has made it possible to help patients heal the wounds of their old Italian self, develop a new German self, integrate them with each other, and thus allow foreign patients to become >citizens of the world.< After presenting the context of his clinical work, including the German Kassensystem and the characteristics of the Italian patients he works with, the author provides the reader with a review of the literature on migration and identity from a psychoanalytic point of view. Sociology and literature also offer an important key to the understanding of his patients. At this point in the paper, the author presents three patients, their history, the background of their migration to Germany, and the work he did with them. This allows him to come to the conclusion that psychoanalysis can help patients actualise the potentialities intrinsic in globalisation, in order to move towards a richer and more sophisticated identity.