Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Introduction • Natale Losi
The interpreter
Briefly, the vocation of an interpreter is to interpret everything, sometimes
changing everything due to the pervasiveness and popularization of psychoanalysis.
The corollary is that the interpreter will find a cause and
reason/justification for every behaviour.
The militant
This is the ghost that believes it possible to intervene everywhere in order
to guide social transformations. In this role, humanitarian workers proceed
by somehow comparing themselves to a kind of prophet, confirming the
participants’ idea that evil comes from outside, that everything is due to
society, and casting aside the fundamental problem of possible connivance
between dominator and dominated, persecutor and victim of persecution.
At the time of our very first training session for the psychosocial counsellors
participating in our course, I vividly remember a conversation with a
young interpreter who already, at that time, (in December 1999), clearly
pointed out the mutual support between victim and persecutor. In her opinion,
she said, this would shortly become evident. “While the Serbs were
still there,” she said, “everything could be blamed on them. Now that
young women are disappearing from the streets, we need to accept the idea
that there is evil also among us.”
The repairer
Their objective is to promote activities by which the community can be
reborn, through the reparation of damages suffered. They will sacrifice
themselves for others, will not waste time and energy, and will lose themselves
in their work, which they see as a true mission. The question I ask
myself about these workers is, first, who invested them with this mission?
Further, will the act of restoring, helping, saving, and dealing with the
“victims”, not help to perpetuate structures of exclusion? What secondary
benefits do those who thus sacrifice themselves receive? It might be suspected
that the repairer, through sacrifice, also sacrifices the others, by
dealing with their problems, and “devouring them” with affection. In this
privileged relationship, the repairers end up alienating the very people they
were trying to help. They somehow live through the death of others.
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