Before addressing the concept of intercultural communication, I would like to reflect on the concept of identity. In analysing this concept I will keep in mind a psychoanalytic point of view, in other words a psychodynamic point of view, read and interpreted within growth, that is, within human development. Let us say at the outset that subjective identity should be understood as a perimeter, a kind of psychic and cultural boundary that is built up progressively through the processes of introjective identification that a subject experiences over the course of growth, over the course of life. Identity is therefore worked out in a continuous dynamic of exchange with the environment of life, where by environment of life we mean the basic affective dynamics of the family sphere and the way these interweave with the cultural models of a social community.

I will now try to introduce a few concepts that define identity from a psychoanalytic point of view. These are positive definitions, concepts that see the experience of identity as rooted in the strength of the ego, and therefore in the ego's capacity to maintain its own unity and continuity amid the changeability of experience and in the face of life's vicissitudes (E.H. Erikson, Gioventù e crisi di identità, Armando, Rome 1974). In these conceptions identity coincides with a subjective sense of coherence and continuity, with the ego's capacity to work through new and different experiences while preserving its own centrality and integrity. Identity is thus rooted in a sense of self that is stable enough to face change, or rather changes, in the external world and in the internal world. The sense of identity is nourished by rootedness and stability, which must nevertheless confront anxieties, separations and conflicts in the internal-external world. Identity consolidates itself precisely in the continuous working through of conflicts and of different experiences, and it matures by integrating past and present experiences over time. We can say, then, that human identity (in a positive sense) is the awareness of an internal unity that arises from the progressive integration of the experiences running through the life stories of a human subject.
This definition of identity as a kind of sufficiently stable perimeter of the ego (or, if one prefers, of the self) remains valid, but it needs to be supplemented by another aspect that allows us to grasp more fully the problem at the centre of our reflection: that of an identity capable of opening itself to communication with difference, with the stranger, in a word, capable of opening itself to intercultural dialogue. The other aspect I am referring to is the awareness that the individual psyche is nothing other than an internalised communicative structure. The positive maturation of the sense of identity is deeply bound up with the richness and variety of intersubjective ties, in particular the original and founding ones. If we turn to the earliest original nuclei of the construction and elaboration of the sense of identity, we may say that the child's growth is marked by the introjective process, by the creative internalisation of significant figures and experiences. The internal world of a growing child becomes unified and stabilised through the communicative richness of the love objects encountered and internalised. The growth and maturation of the sense of identity is the fruit of a process of separation and differentiation, from which the progressive individuation of the self arises. It is the fruit of the progressive introjection of a complex network of affective and cognitive communications that make possible the elaboration of the mind's communicative qualities. It is through this separating, differentiating and, at the same time, internalising of communicative models that the identity boundary, indispensable to psychic life, becomes a place of exchange and communication with the outside.
To sum up, we may say that in early childhood the sense of identity is built on a double movement: separation and differentiation from the original matrix, and the internalisation of protective images. Human growth, in this way, is the fruit of relational experiences animated by a dialogic exchange between child and environment, which becomes an internal communicative model for the introjective process and translates into a form of inner dialogue between experiences and parts of the mind.

This capacity for external communication, which is progressively internalised, is not developed in a linear way. It must contend with conflicts and with anxieties of separation, abandonment and persecution that make the path toward a stable identity problematic, and that certainly make it a laborious, progressive achievement. I would like to give substance to these considerations with a brief reference to the work of M. Mahler (La nascita psicologica del bambino, Boringhieri, Turin 1975). Studying the process of separation-individuation in early childhood, Mahler analysed and described the anxieties bound up with the presence and the perception of the stranger in the minds of small children. This experience is related to the maturation of identity, to the distinction between the self and the other, between what is familiar and what is not. To simplify, one may say that there are children who, in the presence of strangers and of an unfamiliar environment, cry and withdraw, while others become curious and begin exploratory activities, remaining essentially calm. Mahler holds that the child who approaches the stranger with trust and sufficient self-assurance has previously been able to elaborate an internal image of the mother (or of the parents) that is substantially good and protective, and that subsequently allows the exploration of what is new and different. Her observations suggest that anxiety toward the stranger has deep roots, which must be related to the richness and intensity of the internal sense of security experienced by the child, and therefore to the substantial normality of the splitting systems he has experienced. In short, for Mahler the great regulator of the processes of growth is the maturation of the introjective process. As was said earlier, the child grows well if, in his maturational process, he internalises love objects onto which he has projected his needs for security, seeing them as contained by it. If these needs have been satisfied, the internalised object (the whole of the relationships experienced) allows a deep openness toward the world of life. In this case the child is emotionally aware that separation does not mean irreparable loss and that the presence of difference does not mean threat, solitude or uprooting. Children who are very frightened of the stranger seem to live out a fantasy of separation that means the loss of the love object and of its protection. As a consequence, they build in the mind a rigid and hostile defensive system toward a stranger felt as an enemy or, more generally, toward change, felt as uprooting and threatening. In this case there is a failure of that movement of identity-growth marked by openness and exchange with experience, to which we alluded earlier.

Let us say, then, that the movement of identity-construction consists in the building of a perimeter that arises from separation and arrives at a sufficient integration of the self, with all the experiences of cohesion, continuity and stability indicated above, rooted in an introjective process lived as genuinely protective, that is, animated by identifications that give strength and cohesion to the self. At this point we must further clarify, in the light of what has been said, the concept of internal integration. Let us say that internal integration comes about through the progressive overcoming of original splits, and therefore through the capacity to take in and integrate what has been felt as conflictual and disturbing, for example as alien and threatening. I would like to add something here about the concept of splitting, without which it is difficult to understand the concept of internal integration that we have used to analyse the concept of identity.

In psychoanalytic literature the term splitting refers both to a splitting of the ego and to a splitting of the object toward which the ego directs its projections. At the outset, what we call splitting allows the child to distinguish good from bad, that is, the things felt as good and protective from the things felt as bad and disturbing. In short, to this splitting of the ego there corresponds, in the external world, an object (the mother, for example) that is now wholly good, now wholly bad, and that progressively unifies, integrates and becomes a real person: the real mother, internalised under a predominantly positive sign. We are within the situation described, within the normal range of the splitting processes that move toward a progressive integration of the self, which manages to perceive itself as sufficiently unified around stable and continuous feelings. If, however, in the course of human growth what prevails is distressing separations, unrepaired experiences of loss or rejection, and unworked fragmentation anxieties, then the way is opened to the perpetuation of the splitting process, which mobilises very strong defences, with a tendency to attribute negative traits to whoever is a stranger and to idealise uncritically whoever is imagined (or held) to be familiar. In short: the good-bad split can evolve pathologically as an individual or a group experience. In other words, when unease and conflict are not understood and worked through, and when the threat remains deep down as an inaccessible, disturbing core, defensive attitudes charged with intolerance readily emerge. Intolerance arises from the fact of having projected internal threats onto external people and experiences in order to be able to control them. The failure of internal integration multiplies and intensifies the split itself, and so it becomes easy to see whoever is merely foreign as disturbing and threatening. Unrepaired splitting produces projection and discrimination; it becomes fear and intolerance of difference, ethnocentric prejudice, an uncritical idealisation of one's own ethnic, cultural and religious belongings. Intolerance is characterised precisely by an exasperation of identity boundaries, rigid boundaries that in their exasperated condition conceal an unbearable anxiety: the anxiety of confusion. Against this anxiety, against the phantasmatic fear of being erased, of not existing, there arise not only forms of discrimination toward particular differences but, at the same time, the defensive fantasy of taking refuge in an original, uncontaminated community with rigid identity boundaries.

These considerations on the highly split nature of the negative projections that translate into prejudice and intolerance make a brief reflection on the concept of tolerance necessary (cf. G. Sacerdoti and A. Racalbuto, eds., Tolleranza e intolleranza, Boringhieri, Turin 1995), tolerance being, moreover, a fundamental experience for all models of intercultural communication. Tolerance of difference, but not only that, let us say the tolerance that makes us pliable and capable of understanding, arises from a mental attitude disposed to take in conflicts, fears and mistrust toward what is new and different, exercising upon all of this a capacity for internal-external transformation. Tolerance arises from a creative function of the mind that comes into contact with what is split and distressing in order to integrate it into one's own internal world and thus transform it, so avoiding a defensive projection of it onto the outside. In short, one becomes tolerant with others when, over the course of one's own life experience, one has tolerated mistrust, doubt, hostility and anger, in the awareness that feelings and thoughts of this kind can arise in oneself and in others out of experiences or fantasies of marginality, loss, solitude, and emotional and cultural fragmentation, with the burden of mental pain that all this entails. Tolerance is owed to this capacity to begin, first of all, a dialogue with one's own split internal parts, and hence with the splits of the other and of his difference. For this dialogue to begin, however, a right and positive perception of one's own identity boundaries is indispensable, indispensable in order to perceive and take in the other. In order to communicate, then, one need not deny one's own ethnic-cultural or religious identity; it is rather a matter of accepting a boundary by regarding it as a place of exchange and sharing, a boundary open to others who are different. Tolerance therefore means the capacity to tolerate negative feelings and thoughts while setting in motion their elaboration and transformation, because they have been understood and annexed to one's own conscious life; but tolerance also arises from a positive rootedness in a cultural identity that moves toward difference, in a right perception of identity boundaries that are open and communicating. Tolerance thus arises from a double movement of communication with oneself and from the definition of an open boundary. It implies a communication toward the inside and one toward the outside, toward the world of life, toward others with their differences. This mental attitude is nevertheless made possible, always and in every case, by relational experiences that are foundational for human development. We have already seen how, in terms of human growth, the experience of welcoming and communicative persons, internalised over time as such, gives rise in the internal world of individual subjects to good, protective and stable images that consolidate the sense of a communicating identity. Let us say that this holds in every case, in every experience and at every moment of the life cycle. Human growth and affective maturation, bound up with the sentiment of tolerance, are rooted in the experience that one's own self is sufficiently recognised in its identity. The awareness of being there, of being recognised and appreciated, of being positively present in the mind of the other, reduces or eliminates frustrations; in every case it allows a working through of the fragmentation anxieties, the fears of rejection and the risk of non-existence that run through the human mind, especially at moments of delicate transition in the life cycle, such as the passage from childhood to adolescence, the taking on of the responsibility of fatherhood or motherhood, the entry into old age, and so on. Every age of life has its moments of transition, moments in which one has a particular need for understanding from the other, from the human community.
Now, the experience of emigration is one of these delicate, complex situations, in which one faces separations, estrangements, problems of change and uprooting, and of the construction or reconstruction of roots both new and old. The experience of emigration puts to the test the emotions and feelings, and more generally the internal world, of every human being, whether it be the emigrant or the one who receives within his own country a substantial presence of emigrants. The sentiment of tolerance, the readiness to welcome and the openness to communication can be sorely tested in the experience of migration.

In effect, emigration is an experience of crisis, in the sense that it is an experience which entails, to a certain degree, an initial disorganisation and, subsequently, a new organisation of the self and of its internal and external relationships. Emigration is an experience of crisis that may evolve in a positive direction, but that in every case engages the sense of identity. Emigration indeed entails a change of cultural horizons, of places, of languages; in short, it is an experience of separation that can bring primary, original fears to the surface: the fear of losing family affections, old ways of life, shared norms, moral codes. This set of lived experiences can be felt to be at risk; in reality the emigrant must face the working through of a mourning for something that he inwardly feels to be at risk of loss. Loss, the anxiety of loss, concerns not only external objects; it also concerns the parts of the self that were contained in those external objects and that are now felt to be at risk. Emigration may therefore entail an initial destabilisation of the sense of identity and an entry into a condition of protective deficiency that has to be understood and worked through in a positive way (L. Grinberg, R. Grinberg, Psicoanalisi dell'emigrazione e dell'esilio, F. Angeli, Milan 1990).
A situation of this kind provokes in the emigrant a series of defences. To the separation anxieties and to the confusion that may follow, the emigrant may respond by denying the separation and by putting forward once again a form of splitting. Splitting may then take the form of a tendency to close in upon one's own roots, one's own memories and traditions, upon a strong idealisation of the distant country, and hence upon the total rejection of the new. Another defence may instead be the opposite attempt: that of idealising the host country while despising one's own past, denying one's own roots. These are two responses of denial and refusal of the work of mourning, aimed at avoiding the pain of change; they are the defences that the ego deploys in order to master the confusion and the devaluation that it meets with daily. The emigrant's problem is therefore that of facing an internal split, the conflict between two cultures, between different experiences that ought to be reworked and integrated within the internal world. This integration is nevertheless made difficult by conflictual social conditions and by the complex identity crisis that the experiences of emigration bring with them. I would like to illustrate this last point briefly by referring to the work of the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun. Ben Jelloun reflects on the children of Arab emigrants from the Maghreb, on the so-called second-generation immigrants. They are young people, often born in France, who live out a particular experience of fragmentation of identity. Their crisis, their unease, arises from living permanently a conflictual split between two cultures, the Western French one and the Arab, Muslim and Maghrebi one of their parents. The latter is experienced as a deprived, devalued culture, as a culture traversed by the experience of uprooting, of exile, of social marginality and of uncertainty about the future. It is hard to take in models of this kind, to carry out good processes of identification with devalued fathers and mothers who have themselves had to face mourning for a lost cultural stability. On the other hand, it is very hard to build good cultural identifications when one is faced with a host culture, the French one, in which it is extremely difficult to put down roots, because it is closed, hard, indifferent, laden with mistrust and discrimination. Thus the vicissitudes of these children of the Maghreb are particularly painful; they do not in fact possess two cultural codes to make interact, but live off fragments of the two cultures, the two languages. The cultures in which they live are partial and in conflict; they subsist on fragments multiplied by the environmental hostility in which they are immersed. Only a few manage to work through the two cultures, the two languages, and to make them live in a communicating and creative way; most live in marginality, in disorder, in uncertainty, out of which violence can arise. In this condition of conflict, of failure in the communication between cultural models, in this utter incapacity of the host country to give a true answer to deep needs, there arises the recourse to fundamentalist Islam, the recourse to a religious faith and a culture that set themselves radically against difference and attempt to save the identity of their members through an operation of totalising closure within their original roots, thereby activating new forms of conflict.
Ben Jelloun writes these pages at the beginning of the 1980s, when Islamic fundamentalism, though present, did not yet have the widespread and pervasive character it has today: "The recourse to Islam, Ben Jelloun observes, is basically a refuge, a dyke to preserve the roots, the origins. It stands in for culture, for language, for identity, and it is what opposes itself to whatever comes from outside" (Ospitalità francese, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1998, p. 103). Naturally, Ben Jelloun does not situate the suffering of these young people only within a social conflict between cultures that do not communicate; as I have mentioned, he situates it within a conflict between generations, between parents and children. It is evident, Ben Jelloun says, that every generation experiences a generational conflict between fathers and sons, but in emigration all this can become dramatic:

"emigration thus produces cracks in ontological security and makes the union of these mutilated beings conflictual. The generational problems of parent-child opposition are certainly not characteristic of the situation of immigrants. They take on a greater acuteness because the reassuring point of reference, the ancestral points of reference, are missing or confused (Ibid., p. 107)"

If this is the impact that emigration can have on the emigrant's sense of identity, then, for the positive or negative resolution of these problems, the attitude of the host community becomes of great importance. We know that the host community can be a factor that aggravates the emigrant's condition of uprooting and thus of mental suffering. The host community can defend itself heavily against emigrants, experienced as those who destabilise order, who do not respect the norms that regulate the life of the community, as those who take away the work of the native population and, above all, who deal drugs and produce delinquency and social degradation. In fact, the host communities too are traversed by deep identity crises. In a social universe like that of wealthy, technologically developed societies, traversed by anxieties about change in social and family ties and by disorientation in shared values, emigration can be seen as jointly responsible for the loss of one's own roots of identity, and thus as a factor that aggravates a widespread insecurity from which there seems to be no way out. The result of all this is the xenophobic defence, the denial of the other masked by indifference, the devaluation of the other's identity and difference, the spread of identity-based localisms and of fundamentalisms that hinder dialogue and communication between cultures.

The presence and spread of identity-based localisms and of cultural and religious fundamentalisms must therefore be understood as a defensive response to rapid, often imposing socio-cultural transformations, which concern the experiences of migration but not only these. The experience of migration is part, as is well known, of highly complex processes of social transformation that have left their mark on the sense of identity, of belonging and of social responsibility of those who live in technologically advanced societies. Let me briefly point to some profound changes that have swept over postmodern societies, shaping their development and contributing, as it is said, to their unhappiness: the speed of technological change; the rapid relocation of economic production and hence, together with the growing precariousness of job security, the weakening of social and affective ties within groups and families; the rapid shift in the spatio-temporal connections and relationships between human beings and places, in the horizons of meaning and the stability of meanings; and finally the loss of ancient roots and of hope in the future, as a consequence of the collapse of what have been called the "grand narratives" of scientific-technological and political-social progress. All this is reflected negatively in the basic ontological security of human subjects, who deeply feel the alteration of the sense of continuity of their own identity and of the constancy and reliability of human relationships. Within this framework, technologically advanced postmodern societies seem to produce emergent psychic pathologies far more widespread than in the past, bound up precisely with transformations that are suffered and ungoverned. Thus there spread in our time, especially among the young, experiences of emptiness and lack, of fragmentation and confusion of identity, of poor cohesion of the self, of non-belonging. In this condition postmodernity, which seems to arise under the sign of openness to the world, to plurality, to difference, is more likely to produce anxious defences that translate into identity-based localisms laden with prejudice toward foreigners, or into the tendency to withdraw into a very personal private sphere in which the narcissistic cultivation of the self, of one's own image, prevails, together with a substantial indifference toward the fate of others, especially the weakest and the poorest (cf. I disagi della civiltà, in "Psiche", year XII, no. 2, 2005).

To counter this drift, we shall certainly have to draw on new ethical-political and social resources; but here we must limit ourselves to taking up again the theme of intercultural dialogue as a space of intervention in situations of migration, with our gaze turned both to the host communities and to the populations that migrate. I would therefore like to point to the value of intercultural dialogue as a therapy for the social ills that afflict our condition as human beings in postmodern societies, but at the same time as the foundation of a specific therapeutic dialogue concerning the intrapsychic life of individuals. I must say at the outset that true intercultural dialogue is above all dialogue with people, people who carry within themselves the life and the history of their culture. Interculturality proceeds from the need to enter into dialogue with the other in order to know him and thus, through this knowledge, to bring to fruition a hidden and unexpressed part of ourselves. The inner structure of every human being is in fact, as was said at the beginning, relational; it originates in relationship and is enriched in relationship. I would add that the very structure of inner truth is relational, made up of continual openings to relationship with the other and with his difference. In short, this movement toward the other may be defined as a way of knowing oneself (R. Pannikar, Pace e interculturalità, Jaca Book, Milan 2002). To give a single example: if we think of the contribution that the religious cultures of the Far East (Buddhism, Hinduism) have made to our own search for interiority and introspection, it is easy to understand how coming into contact with these cultural and religious differences has made a great contribution to the self-knowledge of those of us in the scientific-technological West, that is, how it has expanded the meaning of our life and enriched the very introspective philosophies and cultures that arise in the Judeo-Christian West. More generally, beyond this example (others could be given), openness to and knowledge of the other are a kind of necessary completion of the knowledge of ourselves, and hence the foundation of our freedom to think and to feel. This digression on intercultural dialogue prepares the ground for a concluding theme, a more specifically therapeutic one, the theme from which we set out and which concerns the psychic suffering of emigrants, and not of them alone.

I return to the initial theme because it is precisely in pathology that the need emerges to practise a therapeutic model centred on an intercultural exchange that is at once interpersonal and intrapsychic. We must start from a consideration made earlier: the mental suffering of the emigrant arises from a rupture in the continuity of the self. It is this rupture that must be worked through and overcome. Naturally, one must be aware that the trauma of emigration cannot be traced back to the pain of departure alone, to the anxiety of separating; it is a cumulative trauma: the pain of the separation experienced activates earlier sufferings and multiplies fear, solitude, marginality, self-devaluation, and the precariousness and unreliability of social ties. At the heart of the suffering of migration there is a rupture of affective ties, and it is this that must be repaired, as external experience and as intrapsychic experience. The therapist has the task of weaving the bonds of meaning, and hence the patient's deep relationships with the culture of origin, and not only with it but also with that of the host country. It is as if the therapeutic work had to build a third space, an intermediate space, a place of exchange between two cultures, between two minds, between two symbolic systems (cf. Z.K.S. Dahoun, La terza riva, in "Emigrazione, sofferenze di identità", "Quaderni di Psicoterapia infantile" 40, 1999). The weaving spoken of here is possible if the therapist manages to take in and mentally contain the shame, the solitude, the devaluation and the aggression that the emigrant brings into the relationship. The first movement of therapy is listening-containment; the second is the progressive reparation of the external human bond and hence, through introjection, of the internal one. It is the modes of welcome and of listening, the new meanings introduced into an experience that seems to have no sense, that make it possible to reduce and overcome the paranoid, aggressive or depressive response that the emigrant gives to cumulative trauma. But what I must stress at this point is that none of this can be brought about if the therapist has not, to a certain extent, set himself to listen to his own split parts, if he has not at the same time taken care of himself, drawing close to his own mistrust, doubts, hostility and anger that run through his mind, in the knowledge that in his case too these can arise from loss and devaluations, consciously or unconsciously undergone in the course of life. Thus, as was said, only by working through the tolerance of his own splits will the therapist be able to help the other to see and overcome his own. Therapy and intercultural communication are, in this sense, evidently reciprocal events. But the same holds, in different forms, for the host community as a whole, which can recover cohesion and the strength to plan for the future only through exchange with, and the welcoming of, the other. The policies of welcome and of intercultural communication thus become social therapies in the full sense, reducing the anxieties of change, the sense of fragmentation and of loss of cohesion of identity, the bewilderment in the face of a transition that must be understood in order to be governed. The broadening of intercultural communication, which passes through awareness of one's own conflicts and one's own splits, is one of the possible social therapies of our time, whose places, modes and spaces of experience it would be worth defining.