Psychodynamic study of relationships between UASC and social workers in second reception facilities in Italy

This paper explores the relational dynamics between social workers and Unaccompanied and Separated Children (UASC) in second reception facilities in the Campania area (Southern Italy). The study is based on a psychoanalytic group approach following the principles of psychoanalysis applied to institutional contexts. The authors are clinicians with a psychoanalytic training. They have trained three students of the Master's Degree Course in Clinical Psychology to use the classic tool of psychoanalytic research, participant observation. The training scheme - an initial period of practice, to learn in a pre-established situation, and a second period of shared and guided reflection on what has been experienced - gives trainees a vantage point compared to social workers who are an integral part of the reality in which they work and are therefore constantly committed to maintaining an inner balance between their personal, relational and emotional involvement and the needs for concrete intervention on this reality that they are responsible for. The weekly observations took place in three second reception facilities; the sample observed consisted of twelve community workers, and twenty-seven Unaccompanied and Separated Children. As regards the workers, the observations allowed researchers to grasp some aspects of their experience such as the disillusionment for the downsizing of the original ideal project, the sense of the limits of their work, the sadness when someone "is lost", but also the satisfaction when they manage to concretely help the kids to get their lives back in hand, after the long period they shared with them as foster carers. We emphasized the need for workers to be able to participate in work discussions led by expert psychologists because they offer a way to contain the anxieties and experiences that, if unrecognized and psychologically unprocessed, compromise their work with unaccompanied minors. With respect to UASC, the observations confirm what is described in the psychoanalytic literature on the topic of youth migration, adding some aspects specifically linked to the cohabitation with the social workers and other guests of the community and to the presence of the participant observers. For migrants, the inelaborable aspects of their migration experience relate to life before migration but also to what they live during the journey and in the host country. Those we have met, are adolescents in whom the loss of cultural and symbolic references breaks through the pubertal crisis, with all the anxieties related to bodily transformations, with no significant adult to turn to. This condition of migrant youths can be effectively defined by the term daily microtrauma, which emphasizes its continuous and pervasive character that does not end with the end of the journey.