18th April 2026 Lecture

Psychoanalytic Work with Migrants and Refugees - Virginia De Micco

To be held online from 10.00am to 12.00noon on Saturday 18th April 2026, by Zoom. Attendance is free of charge for all FPC members and will count as 2 hours CPD. The lecture will not be recorded. To book a place please email admin@thefpc.org.uk 

Presenting a rich panorama of the clinical issues facing those who experience migration and considering the potentially devastating impact of migration on one’s sense of personal and cultural identity, using clinical vignettes from reception centres to illustrate the experience of both adult and adolescent migrants. Virginia De Micco looks at the transgenerational impact migration can have on psychic development and child-parent relationships, both on a socio-anthropological and an unconscious level. She highlights the unique migratory experience of both women and mothers, dealing with the grief and guilt that can arise in these nuanced situations. Adopting an anthropological approach, De Micco also considers the irrevocable impact of migration on the host country, looking both at the reaction of those who live in the receiving countries as well as the broader impact of multiculturalism and globalisation. De Micco offers a deep, fundamental understanding of the psychic conditions and reactions of people receiving migrants, with a view to avoiding cultural misunderstandings and bias and improving the integration process.

Virginia De Micco is a psychiatrist and anthropologist based in Italy. She is a full member of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI) and is a member of the IPA Research Group for Geographies of Psychoanalysis, the IPA Committee on Humanitarian Psychoanalysis, and the EPF Group on 'Psychoanalysis Migration and Cultural Identities'. She is the chair of the PER group (Psicoanalisti Europei per i Rifugiati) of the Italian Society. She works in the psychocultural field, particularly with migrants and refugees, with special attention to cultural differences, the psychodynamics of racism and prejudice, anthropological transformations and their consequences on subjectivation processes, mother-child relations, and the transgenerational aspects of traumas in migratory experience.