Welcome from Società Psicoanalitica Italiana

Dear friends, dear colleagues, it’s a great pleasure for me to bring you a greeting from the SPI Executive committee that I represent today. I am very sorry not to be with you today, among people very dear to me but, unfortunately, the overlapping of multiple commitments, forces me to intervene remotely. The initiative of the Veneto center, which I thank in the person of President Campanile and the entire local executive, is, as always, of the highest profile and is part of a line of continuity with activities undertaken by the SPI and other centers of the SPI in a dark moment for the history of our Europe. Since the beginning of the conflict, the SPI has placed itself at the side of the Ukraine and of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Society by providing it with therapeutic, scientific, logistical and, within the limits of its possibilities, economic support.

The ground of political and scientific exchange, after a prompt statement in support of Ukrainian people and colleagues, by our President, Sarantis Thanopulos, saw the participation of the President of the Ukrainian society, Olexandra Mirza, at the XX national congress of the SPI. We supported and promoted the sharing of scientific seminars in collaboration with psychoanalysts from different geographical areas, including one last Sunday on trauma, and we set up an internal task force that led the delegations of the two societies, Italian and Ukrainian, to meet in Vienna during the annual conference of the EPF for a scientific, cultural, economic and therapeutic collaboration. The SPI economically, in its small way contributed with a donation and a fundraiser, donated to the Ukrainian Society. From the point of view of the humanitarian emergency, we have moved to create a listening network. We immediately set in motion a task force, through the PER group (a group of psychoanalysts working with refugees), to mobilize local forces to take care of refugees and relatives of the victims of the conflict, numerous on our national territory

The combined effort has led to the result of cooperation with other national and international political actors: The Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), the Exarchate of the Ukrainian Church in Italy, the Association of Ukrainian Psychologists, the Alfredo Rampi Center, and the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Which allows today to have a collaboration agreement that has the purpose to offer psychic support to Ukrainian refugees and to support operators who collaborate to provide this support, through the activation of three listening locations. For the moment two in Rome and one in Milan, with a view to expanding this logistical support to other local realities. This, while aware that this is a drop in the ocean of suffering that affects our Ukrainian friends, is what the SPI has so far managed to do with the joint commitment of the forces at our disposal.

I wish all of you a full success of today’s conference, hoping that psychoanalytic thought can help to understand more and better the reasons for so much pain.

Thank you