Abstract
The 3rd of April 2014, after few months in hospital, Anna Maria Traveni left us. She has been a very important and well known Group Analyst in Italy and in the international context.
When she was a child, she was a refugee with all her family from the Valley of Istria, because at the end of the second world war this part of the Italian country was annexed to the ex-Yugoslavia. Her father was imprisoned in the internment camps created by Tito and when he came out he remained deeply marked by this experience.
These historical aspects of her life laid the foundation and orientation for all Traveni’s future clinical work. From the very beginning to the end all her efforts were aimed at maintaining a political dialogue between communist and capitalist countries and between different cultures.
She started to work and use Group Analysis in a public mental health service in the suburbs of Turin (Italy), after the early death of her husband, the psychiatrist Luciano Gregoretti. He was one of the founders of the psychiatric reform (the 180 law) which allowed the closure of the Italian psychiatric hospitals.
Her purpose was to offer a therapeutic space able to let patients talents emerge and enable them to connect with each other. Next she initiated reflections among intellectuals, scientists and clinicians on the importance of groups in a changing world.
In 1985 she was one of the founders of a Group Association called APRAGI. The Association had group analysis and psychodrama psychotherapists working together and putting in interaction different techniques. The main goals pursued were to form new generations of group leaders and to create cultural events in a Group Analytic way.
The APRAGI became the model of the future COIRAG, a confederation of different group analytic and psychodrama oriented institutes.
In 1990 she organized an important convention on the “East- West” relationship. The event opened a debate and a cultural confrontation between researchers, psychiatrists and psychologists who came from all over the world and, anticipated metaphorically, the fall of the Berlin wall.
In 1991, Anna Maria opened the “Permanent Dream Academy”, a meeting space for movie and theatre directors, group analysts and people interested to a multidisciplinary perspective on the oneiric language.
Anna Maria has always been an eclectic person, a lover of processes rather than structures. Her main interest was addressed to collect trans-collective evidences and to point out the relationship with the individual symptomatology. This linkage was conceived circular and traceable through the different levels of the imaginary productions.
For her, Group Analysis was a method to access the recursive connections within all imaginary levels, but also an epistemology able to focus on the emotive resonances between individual and society which could be used to explain blocks to learning (ego and superego inhibitions)as well as our capacities to develop.
In her last years, Traveni dedicated herself to the creation of large group events in town. Throughout two events each year she was able to gather together psychologists, psychiatrists and common people. She was convinced that mental development takes place on the root of a cultural happening. The family is an anthropological foundation which mediates the trans-collective themes and structures the way in which the individual will conceive these issues (Foundation Matrix.
In synthesis, besides psychopathology, Traveni managed to show the individual trainee, the way he or she can become “subject”, of their own ability to move through the trans collective influences and to choose his/her own vision.
The “Existential authenticity” through history and cultural bias is at the heart of her commitment. From this perspective, the loss of identity and depersonalization related to the loss of a social context and of a cultural identity must be treated creating social connections, building collective mental spaces, bonding the body into its emotive and imaginary levels.
The “Large Groups in Town”, the “Permanent Dream Academy”, the events “Crossing the screen”(2011), days dedicated to psychoanalysis and to cinematography and “Limits and Power”(2012,2013), dedicated to the relationship between the intra psychic and the social life, responded to this effort to create possible “Community Habitats” useful to both the individual and for society.
While we were collecting ideas and looking for references to narrate her contribute to Italian group Analysis, we were a little bit disoriented to discover how little she had written compared to the many cultural and group analytic events she created; or to the frequency of her name in the international context; or to the celebrity and reputation within the young group analysts.
In effect we can say that she left her aggregative matrix inside each one of us, colleagues and followers, who have been permanently moved by meeting her.