Milan, 20 November 2023 – “We have to educate at schoolwork on the contrast to feminicide from an early age thinking about the changes in one post narcissistic society. The theme is not patriarchal possession, but greater social fragility and relationships whose constraints are relative.”
Matteo Lancini, psychologist and psychotherapist, professor at the Bicocca University of Milan
Matteo Lancini, psychologist and psychotherapistpresident of the Minotauro e professor at the University of Milan Bicocca, is a scholar of youth problems. His latest volume for Raffaello Cortina Editore has an emblematic title: “Be yourself in my way. Being adolescents in the era of adult fragility”.
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Professor Lancini, how do we get out of this spiral of hidden violence from pseudo-amorous motivations?
“Understanding what goes on in the heads of adolescent couples or young adults. For many kids, the first girlfriend is the second love object compared to the mother and when the relationship ends a void is created filled with sadness, anger, disappointment. We must intervene on acceptance before it becomes violence”.
Which tool can be used?
“With the Minotauro association we are experimenting with a reasoning to bring into the classrooms: considering the end of a couple relationship as part of the relationship itself. Learning to leave and be left. The mediation of abandonment is vital because anger, sadness and violence towards self and others are no longer a drama”.
But how do we arrive at this mediation?
“The dynamic is complex, but we must set ourselves an objective: since the couple has had meaning for both, there must be the evolution of an end. Communicate that this relationship when it ends on one side enters maintenance to be another” .
Is this awareness raising process always successful?
“When in the mediation on how to break up a possibility of violence is perceived, the relationships must end.”
How much could Giulia’s success in studies have weighed on Filippo while his own seemed precluded at the time?
“I don’t think much. The problem is abandonment, the autonomization of growth which can be badly perceived by the individual who feels left aside”.
How do you deal with the danger of a tragedy?
“With the reorganization of the idea of the couple and gender identity. Educate affectively, realizing that the role of sexuality and procreation which was previously the fulcrum of humanity has changed. The relationship linked only to the use of the body is no longer binding”.
So what holds up a bond, let’s say, love?
“Not sexuality, which has collapsed, or transgression. Anyone who says that teenagers are transgressive doesn’t know them. What matters is living in the mind of the other person, not in the body: the look is more important than the act.”
And how is this change brought about?
“By exploiting the power of the internet at school, turning it on and not banning it: preventing this medium from becoming a orientor of adolescent impulses outside of an educational and controlled context. The school seems not to want to connect to modern society, but must teach that the web is not for come on pornography.”
What can politics do?
“Understand that sexual education at school does not create perverse kids, but is a communication on rational awareness. And in class we don’t talk about assisted procreation or other things about sexuality that can no longer be eliminated by leaving this field to the internet.”
Do we need a law to define these programs?
“We need mediators of the emotional states of adolescence. Money to open mental health offices in schools. It is not a problem of laws and advertising campaigns, but of facing a new normality in gender relations and knowing how to interrupt them.”
