The past if past: The use of memories and self-healing narratives in refugees from the former Yugoslavia

Especially in the case of refugees, the past and its memory tend to be definitional components for personal and social constructions of identity. At the same time, the relationship with the past is frequently problematic and challenging. This study identifies two main narratives and subject positions adopted by refugee participants from the former Yugoslavia: ‘the past is past’ and ‘the past is our strength.’ I analyse the complexity implicit in these two narratives about the past. Although these narratives at first appear contradictory, the participants’ stories illustrate the ways in which they co-operate for the development of mental health in refugees. The ongoing dialogue between the two narratives allows for the participants’ endorsement of subject positions that refer to both individual and collective identities. The strategic use of history permits reinterpretations and relocations of traumatic memories as well as the formation of self-healing narratives that reframe refugee identities in the light of ethnic history and shared experience. I critically discuss the implications of this narrative reframing in relation to aspects of dominant discourses about refugee mental health and postmodern considerations in psychology and counselling

Between researcher and researched: An introduction to countertransference in qualitative inquiry

When doing research on topics that are sensitive and involve core dimensions of the researcher’s identities and subjectivities, the process of inquiry is likely to generate significant emotions, attachments, and reactions that transgress traditional forms of data and research positions. If embraced and addressed, the researcher’s emotional reactions can be an important source of reflexivity and data as well as creativity, motivation, and engagement. This relational aspect of the research parallels psychotherapists’ experience of reacting to their clients’ concerns and narrations. This process—called countertransference (CT)—may leave the researcher open to vulnerability and the need to account for the necessary presence of personal biographies and identities in qualitative inquiry. From my research with refugees, I provide examples of my CT reactions and interpretations and the ways in which they became crucial assets to the study

Toward a critical reflexivity in qualitative inquiry: Relational and posthumanist reflections on realism, research's centrality, and representationalism in reflexivity

To critically understand the complexity of the concept and practice of reflexivity, I offer an exploration of some of its epistemological and ontological foundations. Specifically, I discuss 3 assumptions that tend to be entailed in most views of reflexivity: realism, humanism, and linguistic representationalism. I provide for each of them a social constructionist or posthumanist reinterpretation on the basis of relational views of ontology and on constitutive understandings of knowledge. I suggest some alternatives to these 3 assumptions in order to foster a plurality of viewpoints about practices of reflexivity and entanglements of objects and subjects. In particular, posthumanist theories may provide the language to counter postpositivist inclinations within qualitative inquiry and to offer horizontal, diffractive, and transformative modes of knowing that more fully embrace reflexivity not as a tool or strategy but as a discursive and performative practice—that is, as inquiry in itself

Counseling and psychotherapy in italy: Historical, cultural, and indigenous perspectives

The field of psychotherapy in Italy shows a plurality of voices that makes it hard to depict it, if not in broad strokes. At the same time, some common elements characterize the main discourses that inform the knowledge, training, and practice of psychotherapy in Italy. Some of these elements are about potentially constructive aspects of the Italian therapy scenario, like the professional regulations given by the Italian Order of Psychologists and the Ministry of Education, University and Research, the humanitarian role of the Roman-Catholic Church, the challenges and opportunities offered by the recent immigration, and the emphasis on relational and ecological (as opposed to detached, laboratory-style, and individualist) approaches to psychology. While other aspects may be deemed questionable and detrimental to the field, like the closed oligarchy of the university system, the relative international isolation of Italian psychotherapists, and the limited dedication to research studies in counseling and psychotherapy, especially concerning issues of cultural diversity and clinical or training outcomes

Postmodern Conceptualizations of Culture in Social Constructionism and Cultural Studies

The theorization of culture in psychology continues to gain momentum in spite of little agreement concerning the most suitable theoretical frameworks for examining cultural phenomena. We explore two contemporary approaches to culture—social constructionism and cultural studies—and examine their relevance for psychology. In juxtapositioning them we map their continuities and discontinuities in terms of ontological and epistemological stances on language, representation, knowledge, identity, history, ideology, social action and emancipation. We propose a bridge between the two, and discuss ways in which the dialogue between social constructionism and cultural studies can deepen psychology’s understanding of culture in the postmodern world

Critical Reflexivity and Intersectionality in Human Rights: Toward Relational and Process-Based Conceptualizations and Practices in Psychology

Within traditional social, community, and clinical psychologies, the human rights framework has typically been interpreted and adopted from a person- or patient-based perspective. While useful and well meaning, ideological values concerning empowerment, agency, and resiliency have often framed human rights interventions or programs within psychology. We propose in this manuscript a theoretical shift for psychology to decentralize the role of the individual human being while at the same time avoiding forms of social behaviorism that tend to portray the person as passive or as reacting to external stimuli. Following this first shift from the individual to the collective, we suggest adopting anti-essentialist discourses about the parties, agents, and issues involved in human rights. To this goal, the philosophical framework of process or relational ontology may be especially useful. Based on critical theory, critical feminism, social constructionist, and post-human views of knowledge and reality, process ontology considers reality as complex, fluid, discursive, and dialogical. The separations between the personal and the political are questioned to underscore the entanglement and inseparability of dimensions of possibility and actions, which are continuous reconstructions. To conclude, we reflect on the ways in which these two movements toward anti-individualism and relational ontology might inform specific practices and reflections within human rights frameworks in psychology

Mind-body relationships in elite apnea divers during breath holding: a study of autonomic responses to acute hypoxemia

The mental control of ventilation with all associated phenomena, from relaxation to modulation of emotions, from cardiovascular to metabolic adaptations, constitutes a psychophysiological condition characterizing voluntary breath-holding (BH). BH induces several autonomic responses, involving both autonomic cardiovascular and cutaneous pathways, whose characterization is the main aim of this study. Electrocardiogram and skin conductance (SC) recordings were collected from 14 elite divers during three conditions: free breathing (FB), normoxic phase of BH (NPBH) and hypoxic phase of BH (HPBH). Thus, we compared a set of features describing signal dynamics between the three experimental conditions: from heart rate variability (HRV) features (in time and frequency-domains and by using nonlinear methods) to rate and shape of spontaneous SC responses (SCRs). The main result of the study rises by applying a Factor Analysis to the subset of features significantly changed in the two BH phases. Indeed, the Factor Analysis allowed to uncover the structure of latent factors which modeled the autonomic response: a factor describing the autonomic balance (AB), one the information increase rate (IIR), and a latter the central nervous system driver (CNSD). The BH did not disrupt the FB factorial structure, and only few features moved among factors. Factor Analysis indicates that during BH (1) only the SC described the emotional output, (2) the sympathetic tone on heart did not change, (3) the dynamics of interbeats intervals showed an increase of long-range correlation that anticipates the HPBH, followed by a drop to a random behavior. In conclusion, data show that the autonomic control on heart rate and SC are differentially modulated during BH, which could be related to a more pronounced effect on emotional control induced by the mental training to BH

Neoliberal and pandemic subjectivation processes: Clapping and singing as affective (re)actions during the Covid-19 home confinement

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the restriction of free movement and the sheltering-in-place became worldwide strategies to manage the virus spread. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, community-based affective events helped people feel less isolated and support each other. In this manuscript, we explore how two of these social practices—clapping and singing—were useful to counter the emotions entailed in the subjectivation processes that accompanied the pandemic. We then argue that, seen as affective happenings, singing and clapping heightened emotions and affects that were already implicit in neoliberalism, mainly anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of precariousness, disposability, and inadequacy. On one hand, singing and clapping were liberatory practices of solidarity and resistance against the changes induced by the pandemic and its biopolitics. On the other hand, they contributed to the primary narratives on social resilience, docile bodies, and biopolitics that informed the crisis management. Singing and clapping also operated as neoliberal technologies of the self by bringing the focus on individual agency, behavioral control, and the sacrifice of specific subjects (e.g., the healthcare workers described as heroes). In short, singing and clapping were affective happenings that instantiated an entanglement of subjectivation practices in which the power to affect and the power to resist coincided

“Keep them out to save our inside:” discourses on immigration by the Spanish far right

Vox is a far-right, Spanish political party that has steadily grown to become the third main party in the national congress. Immigration is a major presence in Vox’s political agenda. Through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we analyze the party’s public speeches and Twitter communications on immigration in the last 3 years, from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to the Ukraine-Russia war in 2022. These contexts have provided a fertile ground for Vox’s concerns with the protection of national borders, the criminalization of African and irregular immigrants, and the Spanish Government’s ineffectiveness to protect the Spaniards’ homes. Vox’s main discursive strategies entail constructions of migrants and migration based on dichotomous binaries, culture clash, exclusionary discourses of domopolitics, and fears of imminent social and cultural changes. These constructions are based on the unproblematized belief on essential and unchangeable values that forge the identity of the homeland, which is implicitly threatened by immigrants. Against the migratory invasion, Vox constitutes itself as the ethical protector of the Spanish society and nation, “out of care for the insiders and not out of hatred for outsiders.

Hate groups targeting unauthorized immigrants: discourses, narratives and subjectivation practices on their websites

The narratives and images on websites of US hate groups that oppose undocumented immigrants represent and reproduce discourses that contribute to the subject formation of group members, who feel ethically obliged to counter unauthorized immigration. Left alone by the government, which is seen as unreliable and uncaring of patriotic values, they position themselves as heroic saviours of the nation. We argue that these hate groups’ ‘games of truth’ develop in response to the perception that irregular immigration threatens specific social orders and values, for instance about citizenship, national identity and otherness. This article helps to understand the ways in which anti-immigrant narratives serve the functions of countering these threats and of asserting the group members’ ethical obligation as a form of care of the self. In other words, from a Foucaultian viewpoint, we interpret the problematizations of ‘illegal’ immigration as discursive practices for the subject formation of hate group members