Ghost from the past: a clinical case study of intercultural therapy in contemporary Italy

In this work the authors aim to present a case study of intercultural therapy undertaken during a hospitalisation. Starting from a view of "comprehension" and "de-centralisation" of one's own cultural points of reference, typical of the "complementarist method" theorised by Georges Devereux, it highlights the relevance of the patient's own theories concerning their suffering during the course of psychiatric treatment. The effort of the therapists in this context is to return to each migrant their own history and to reinstate their own specific life context, avoiding hte attempt to fix the patient's definition within nosographic categories or rigid models based on "a priori" assumptions. In this sense, the methodology employed by the ethno-therapist is not only suitable for patients belonging to cultures distant from ours, but it also becomes applicable for those who are local whenever, during the course of a therapy, specific cultural elements might emerge.