Η ψυχοδυναμική των διαπολιτισμικών επαφών

Abstract

Please note: this article is in Greek. Psychodynamics of inter-cultural encounters (Greek presence in Australian society and the emergence of Greek/Australian subjectivity): The paper explores the discursive practices introduced by the Greek Australian communities over a long period of time in order to express their experience of migration and relocation. It observes that throughout the existing narratives the most obvious trope of articulation is that of “the rhetoric of the victim and of self-victimisation” which permeates most forms of historiography and literature which came out of the Greek-Australian experience. The paper analyses how this trope of representation incapacitated Greek language for establishing symbolic connections and places of convergence with the Australian otherness and consequently how otherness itself remained inarticulate within the creative imaginary of the community. The paper argues that such existential silencing of the Other was due to the interests of the Greek-Orthodox Church which imposed an introverted fear of the Other and to the inability of civil organisations to secularise the political discourses within the Greek-Australian community. Finally the papers cites two testimonies from an ordinary woman and from a prominent politician relocating the centre of the problematic relationship within the Greek-Australian subject itself and its inability to see the different social structure and political representation of the self in liberal democracies of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, having itself being formed under conditions of social oppression and psychological repression. It concludes that migration is an experience which alters both the migrating and the host traditions by fostering a creative osmosis of cultural variables and culture is the space between the institutions of the state which make possible the rise of individuating processes, giving thus the ability to fulfil and develop the potential of the individual