Facing the earthquake: a case study in the centre of Italy

This paper illustrates a case study on people resident in the Velino Valley (in the centre of Italy), hitted by several seismic events during last year. Their affective symbolizations of territory after the earthquakes were explored, from 25 interviews with key-figures in the Valley. According to Matte Blanco’s theory of bi-logic(1975) people share symbolic, emotional and unconscious representations about the context they’re living in, including their home territory and communities. Large-scale traumatic events like earthquakes or terroristic attacks hit the whole communities and change that unconscious relations within the objects in the context. This change could inhibit a resilient re-organization of involved people and facilitate the development of post-traumatic psychopathology symptoms. The set of shared affective symbolizations of the context (Local Culture) can be read from the narratives collected through interviews. The text analysis is performed by a software that breaks down the semantic associations, and organizes the words into clusters. The clusters interpretation is conducted by the clinician in a way reminiscent of free associations. The analysis detected five clusters shaping the local culture of the residents in the Velino Valley: a feeling of deprivation and urgency about competition for scarce resources(1); the fear for the earthquake and the emotional processing of the trauma(2); the idealization of the territory as eternal and beautiful(3); the pedagogical relationship with the administration (4); the isolation and devaluation of social relationships(5). Some hypotheses were proposed for improving the process of elaboration of the social trauma in the Valley.