When I arrived there, I knew almost
anything neither of his history nor of his
present. However there I had started as young and
inexperienced psychiatrist.
My
first impression was that of a place contained on
him self, wrapped
around an invisible, monastic
and claustrophobic secret.
The
insufficient afternoon light and the first
autumnal dense fog imposed
this feeling on the conscience, and they worried
it.
The first impact, the first vision reported
from the persons who worked there already
and which would share with me this professional
experience, was that there wouldn't be much work:
few the patients, common the histories.
Everything would have been covered, during the
winter, with a layer of snow, initially light and
thin, after hard like white concrete.
The city seemed to have anything to say to one
coming from the external world. While fleeting signs
announced clearly that I had crossed an invisible
border, but certain, between what remains outside
and what, in this territory silent lay, contained by
invisibles restrains.
Later,
much more lately, a collective, merciless and firm
work of deletion would come in evidence. But
what everybody tries so hard, to delete?
Later,
much more lately, I fortuitously learned,
by
reading a historical article of commemoration of the
tragedy of Mattmark, that seven victims
came from this territory. (In August of 1965,
a glacier of the Swiss Alps is reversed on the
building sites prepared for the construction of the
dam Mattmark, making a massacre of men.)
Involved
with emotion in its tragic destiny all the country
took part in the anguish which didn't spared
nobody.
The authorities, the families, the clergy and the
politicians activated a bridge for the mourning and
the solidarity, in front of the most important
tragedy of the emigration in foreign country, until
this moment, that this community had to face.
In
the time when I worked, wrote and marked research
there (1982-1990) nobody referred me about
this event, whereas all knew my specific
interest for the migratory events.
I
was maintained at side of all this. Even
after years of permanence in the territory, after
having known hundreds of cases and emergent events
of the historical background of the emigration of
mass.
Immediately
I justified such a behaviour believing to recognize
a manner of excluding me, because external member of
this intimate sphere, which crystallizes inside a
community struck by a collective tragedy.
Then
I reached the conviction that this radical
strategy of isolation and repression of the
drama was mostly addressed to
the members belonging of right to the community.
The
intolerance of the event, therefore, wasn't to go up
on the surface of the collective consciousness,
because it still didn't know how to file the problem
of the emigration like choice of survival.
Besides,
at a distance of time, it couldn't be proposed to
the attention of the younger generations the history
of this event, still dissuasive and threatening,
able to involve in the feeling of bad luck, not only
the destiny of an individual or a family, but that
of a whole population.
Salvatore INGLESE:
doctor, psychiatrist and
psychotherapist.
He achieved his own vocational training spending
periods of study and research in Italy and in the
foreign country. Since years he studies the
psychic illness of the populations of migrants in
Italy, France, Switzerland and Canada, lend
particular attention to the existing relations
between psychopathology and cultures of origin of
the patients (ethno psychiatry). On these topics
he collaborates with "Societa Italiana di
Antropologia Medica", " Organizzazione
Interdisciplinare Sviluppo e Salute " and the
laboratory of history Dedalus. Author of many
scientific publications in Italian, French and
English, affiliated at eminent national and
international scientific companies, he makes part
of the Council of the Secretariat of the Calabrian
section of the Italian society of Psychiatry.
Currently he works near the service of the mental
health of Catanzaro.
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