Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
into the essentialist, self-victimizing and differentialist narratives, consistent
with a social and cultural world created by antagonizing “sames”
against “others”, without trying to challenge those very narratives at the
same time? How far should we reconstruct for them a meaningful and
ontologically secure world by these existing cultural resources, if the latter
were structured around binary oppositions that produced ethnic hatred and
war, and that undermined not only the possibility of multiethnic coexistence,
but the very process of the introduction of democracy in all of the
Balkan region?
I think these questions are crucial in a project of psychosocial intervention.
Perhaps we should not limit ourselves to collecting existing narratives of
illness and healing, in order to reintegrate people within locally existing
definitions of personhood and configurations of society, thus avoiding the
risk of Western ethnocentric pathologization and psychologization. This
methodology and approach is, of course, fundamental, but not sufficient,
as its implicit cultural relativism carries within it a philological and conservationist
approach to societies and cultures. These should not be seen as
something local and separate, as something to respect and preserve in a
vacuum, but rather as the outcome of a network of contradictory dynamics
adjusting themselves continually to new perceived and experienced threats
and needs. Local societies, however, are now increasingly becoming
places of interaction and experience of both multi-local and global dynamics.
Acknowledging this would also mean facing and dealing with the
political and social consequences of psycho-social intervention. In this
perspective, what was and still is really at stake in contemporary
Yugoslavia is the process of democratization. This process cannot occur
without the introduction of a cognitive and libidinal framework that
acknowledges difference as a founding element of the natural order, rather
than as a threat and anomaly.
Of particular importance to our common effort is the fact that since the
homogeneous and the heterogeneous opposing cognitive worlds are also
moral worlds, they will necessarily produce their own opposing definitions
of justice, each of which will be tied to a definition of acceptable individual
and social behaviour. It is because of these opposing definitions of
political and social justice, that conflicts and “traumatic” events take place,
and it is usually in the language of political and social justice, that a solution
to suffering and trauma is sought and articulated by the actors of the
narrated events: the refugees.
In my last visits to rump Serbia and Kosovo, I was bewildered by the fact
that in both settings, people usually seek therapeutic help and are treated
within their ethnic groups. At times, refugees even sought help from other
130