Carnevali, Cinzia, Ravaioli, Laura, & Vandi, Gabriella. (2024). ‘Adolescence, migration, music and psychoanalytic tools into play’. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 40(2), 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12887

The authors of this article, Freudian psychoanalysts in Italy, report on psychological and artistic experiments organized over three years to help recent migrants integrate into Italian culture and high schools. They note that war, poverty, and globalization have created enormous migration flows afflicting millions with a range of psychological challenges meriting some kind of intervention. These migration flows, however, have impacted some countries more than others; many European countries along the Mediterranean, such as Italy, have had to contend with the devastating effects of migration face on. The authors’ experiments are thus praiseworthy given the severity of the problem and the existential distress that migrants can experience when they navigate disparate cultures. The authors contend that migration is often a traumatic journey associated with loss and dislocation that is therefore amenable to psychoanalytic paradigms of wounding, object relations and play. By drawing on group psychoanalytic techniques embedded in psychodrama and popular music, they encouraged the migrants to express their psychological concerns and to create new bonds with native Italian students. The arguments in this article thus draw on several interdisciplinary strands of psychotherapy including traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, the tenets of group psychoanalysis, concepts from object relations, and the ideas of play and attachment theory. This eclecticism reflects the sophistication of its approach but can also become excessively prescriptive, sacrificing depth for breadth in such a compact space. The idea that both adolescence and migration are transitional journeys is one of the principal arguments here. Migrants “struggle with a new body that they will have to narcissistically reinvest and symbolically” (p. 201) re-inhabit—just like adolescents who must adapt to new social realities and responsibilities. This tenuous situation also “brings the person into contact with unconscious experiences of helplessness … when the baby is completely dependent on others” (p. 201), another analogy that is later expanded when the musical group evokes the maternal as dependable safe space, figuring Winnicott’s notion of “holding.” Despite the article’s wealth of citations and contexts for music therapy, drawn mostly from one-to-one psychoanalytic work, the impression that more could have been written about group music therapy from a theoretical perspective remains. A search on PUBMED for the string “group musical therapy” generated almost 5000 results. Given that the leader of group analytic sessions is called a “conductor”, for example, I wondered why the authors did not seize on this convention for its implications in a project about musical group therapy (Davies et al., 2015, p. 48). The authors are innovative in appropriating rap music to foster integration between the migrants and their hosts. Rap music “has been chosen … because it is one of the artistic forms of resistance against authoritarianism, and ‘resistance’ is intended here as the act of resisting difficulties or the ability to develop resilience” (p. 200). The migrants and their student hosts attend workshops with a local rapper to encourage more open communication using music as their cultural mediator. There are missed opportunities to look beyond rap music merely as a symbol of resistance, considering the exquisite richness of rap music as an art form and the fact that many migrants arrive from Africa to Europe. For example, West African Griot chanting is a known precursor of rap music, and these artists often use song and voice to communicate an oral history of their culture (Howard University Centre for African studies, n.d., Transatlantic Memories: Senegal’s Hip-Hop Griots). By choosing rap as a cultural mediator, the authors thus imply that migrants are also protecting and continuing indigenous identities during the process of integration into Italian society. Rhythm and Blues, one of the precursors of rap, is another genre the authors could have included, since its association with sadness, spirituality and loss could easily apply to the underlying experiences of migrants who leave family and loved ones behind to embark on uncertain journeys. Some attention to the disconnected speech patterns and sounds of rap music might have enriched this article’s exposition of the migrant experience. Surely disconnection and percussiveness, features of rap music that are almost universal, are also attributes of their journeys as migrants must reconnect to new cultures and attempt to harmonize with new societies. The choice of rap music evinces many archetypal undercurrents beyond the merely theoretical ones proffered by the authors (Kroeker, 2019). From a Jungian perspective, the project of integration through music is also one of individuation. As Patricia Skar notes, “music is similar [to individuation], in that it makes sound coherent, ordering it in time and creating a meaningful synthesis out of its contrasting elements” (Skar, n.d., para. 3). Jung’s argument that individuation concerns adaptation to the collective thus manifests in the migrants’ re-integration into new cultures and societies through rap music (Jung, 1920, para. 738).