Conference Agenda

Over the last twenty years, I have developed a clinical and research practice with Tunisian couples and families in peri-revolutionary Tunisia (The time around January 2011 when a popular revolt broke out with the dictatorship, marking the beginning of a long, ongoing transition towards democracy). I have witnessed during this practice the struggle of Tunisian couples and families with the political and social changes underway. The phenomenon of globalization has accentuated the issue by reshaping links and subjectivities and redefining the scenery of couples and families in Tunisia, as well as in the rest of the world.
Furthermore, revised metapsychology has imposed a new representation of subjectivity as occurring in a tri-dimensional space: the intrapsychic, the intersubjective, and the trans-subjective areas (Berenstein and Puget, 2008) holding the subject of the unconscious, the subject of the link and that of the culture, respectively. In the present Tunisian context, intersubjective links are formed and unraveled through confrontation between tradition and hypermodernity. These vertiginous socio-political changes have induced polymorphous tensions, which I describe as “Interlocking violence” (Mokdad-Zmitri, 2019). Seeking a tailored approach to such a transitory context, I combined group psychoanalysis and intercultural psychology to further elucidate the field's particularities. I suggest highlighting this reflection with two examples: The first being the impact of political issues on institutions, illustrated by the struggles of the socio-educational subjectivities in Tunisian public schools, and the second being the radical change in gender relations and roles within couples, families, and the community due to the depatriarcalisation of the latter.
The present work aims to show how subjectivities cannot take place without clashing with ambient violence. In such situations, individual, family, and socio-politico-cultural conflicts will inevitably resonate to elaborate traumatic content while contaminating, as little as possible, other areas of subjectivation.

Many generations of people suffer from distress that is a manifestation of broken systems, policies and institutions. Social structures demolish communities and isolate wounded souls. Not enough people dare to ask: who is there for the imprisoned, who are unseen, unheard and left as an afterthought. What does an intolerable internal and external world do to a person!? How do you help those who have already been told they are less than human; that they’re already guilty; that their pathology makes them unable to be helped and incapable of healing. The collateral damage of incarceration grips the lives of the generations that are destined to carry our society forward. The empirical literature has shown that children who are born to parents who have been incarcerated are more susceptible to becoming victims of the system, as they are six times more likely to become incarcerated themselves (Cox, 2009). Angela Davis, an anti-prison activist states that communities composed of people of color have a greater chance of going to prison than receiving a “decent education” (Davis, 2003). Dead and dry places don’t acknowledge human suffering and therefore snuff the hope out of human life. Unfortunately, a correctional facility in a major urban area in the U.S. is the largest mental health institution in the state of New York, and the second largest in the country (nytimes, 2023); however, this psychiatric institution holds little correctional and healing value; as mental health services are not a priority. Within my paper, I hope my words are able to speak to what my eyes and ears have witnessed; and what my body has felt, as a clinician who sought to be there for those needing love and hope within those alienating jail houses that are deemed to be psychiatric inpatient units.

People-to-people work in public welfare services is grounded in a learning approach as one of the imperative understandings of human development and growth – often situated in different forms of collaboration and participation. However, this represents a difficult challenge for a public sector that regimes of New Public Management have regulated for decades, providing limited space for learning. Learning theory, on the other hand, is rich in transformative learning concepts that offer a variety of ways and paths for change - such as experiential and collaborative learning (Mezirow, 2000; Barkley, Cross & Major, 2005), social learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Becker-Schmidt & Knapp, 1987), situated or action learning (Dilworth & Willis, 2003; Cho & Marshal, 2010) as well as more critical concepts like sociological imagination and critical pedagogy (Negt, 1975, 1985; Ziehe & Stubenrauch, 1996; Ziehe, 2001). But learning also reveals another side since it is a potent implementation tool that serves many interventions' objectives.

In Denmark, welfare service professionals, for decades, have been active agents in implementing welfare strategies and societal transformations through interventions and workplace learning (Andersen, 2020,2016; Andersen & Dybbroe, 2011; Diochon & Anderson, 2011; Kamp & Dybbroe, 2015). I suggest that identification, ambivalence, and defence reactions constitute a significant (psycho-societal) analytical grid for studying welfare services. I label this position 'psycho-societal' to stay close to the roots of critical theory developed by the Frankfurter School, accentuating the interrelation and interconnectedness between societal structures and cultures and the formation of subjectivity and identity. Professionals display differentiated ways of understanding, processing and enacting – based on identification with the objectives and goals of neoliberal governance demands. We might label these intersections of significant interaction and meaning 'sticky constructions', as suggested by Britzman, acknowledging the potential bearing of insight into current welfare service work shared by these phenomena (Britzman, 2011).

We have been dealing with multiple and simultaneous losses. We are still experiencing the traumatic effects of the pandemic while witnessing war and environmental devastation in the four corners of the planet. Wendy Hollway, in the 2023 APCS Conference, mentioned international research carried out in 10 different countries, in which 50% of youngsters said they feel anxious about climate issues, and many of them considered that adults are leaving a trail of destruction and death as a legacy. It is also known that suicide rates among young people have increased. Rahel Boraks (2008), a Brazilian psychoanalyst, points out that “experiencing loss demands a sophisticated emotional organization, able to keep the person alive for their own experience of loss”. Nowadays, according to Boraks, many individuals “do not even manage to achieve the experience of being alive and, in face of loss, it is their own self that is shipwrecked”, left to “cultivate an infertile land of desires and emotions as a means of surviving in an equally inhospitable world.” Anne Brun (2018), interested in the clinical nature of cases like these, questions “How to define specific modalities of analytical work when confronted with cases of non subjectified parts of psychic life, or even in the expectation of subjectivation?” From Boraks’ ideas, we will seek to echo Brun’s inquiry in the pedagogical field. Is it possible to formulate a pedagogical theory aimed at youth who are heirs to so much loss and whose psyche has not even reached the experience of being alive? Is it possible for this theory to be guided by the goal of inspiring pedagogical practices able to foment and fertilize the expectation of subjectivation, instead of just helplessly assisting those resigned to psychic survival in infertile lands in an inhospitable world?