Psychological aid and clinical experience during an internship in a mental health service of Avezzano - L’Aquila – Sulmona

Abstract

The report summarizes a psychological aid experience carried out in a Mental Health Centre (MHC) of L'Aquila after the 2009 earthquake. The author of the study has been working for three years as a trainee at a school of Psychoanalytic And Psychotherapy. The report starts analyzing the relationship of the trainee with the Centre itself from the very first steps and it also explains the cultural and historical background in which the trainee has been operating, explaining the way in which she was responsible for her patients, the way she has managed the questions she has been addressed and the way the teamwork along with the exchange with other colleagues have enabled her to pass from an unaware accomplishment of her tasks to a more conscious way of operating. The patients coming to the MHC represent the reification of cultural models that help to establish the sense of belonging, the collective identity of a specific territory and, in this sense , they represent a perfect observation point from which it is possible to explore the problems of the environment, more generically, in order to try and make conjectures for the development of new techniques of psychological analysis.