Several years after, during a particular moment of job crisis, these reflections made me realize a new project: the opening of a therapeutic community.

On the 21st of December 1997,winter solstice day, the therapeutic community “Rosa dei venti”  for teenagers affected by psychic, affective and relationship problems opens. The choose of the date deals with my love for the sky.

Years after daily and nightly observations with the research group of “sky education” in Rome which I belong to, I’ve been able to understand how that date correspond -for people who lives in Italy or at similar latitudes-to the day in which the sun less shines, but from that moment on, day after day, the sun begins to shine every day  longer and longer. I’ve chosen that day  as a lucky one.

We have decided for the name “Rosa dei venti” with all the other founders of the association: my passion for sky observation meets Giorgio Grungo’s love, dear old friend and colleague, for wind and sea. The “Rosa dei venti”(compass card/rose window),allow us to organize the space analogically, so it meets my desire to reorganize the interior and disoriented space of the guys which join the community.

We decided that the building where the community seats had to be in the centre of the town near to the railway station and to lakes and mountains. Here we can accept 8 teenagers both male or female between 13 and 18 years old, affected by psychic and affective problems, those pathologies recognised as psychosis or personality disturbs which still today are seen with fear and diffidence by the people and the common thought.

The main aim of the community is to activate a curative process. The operators, who take care of the teenagers, try to involve as most as possible the family and naturally the public services. The main objective of the community is to start a therapy or a process which has the purpose to show the unexpressed autonomy and potentialities of the teenagers for a new correct re-insertion in the social community.

In my opinion the key to succeed lays in a constant auto-observation and in a conscious work on the way of thinking and living feelings and emotions both felt by the teenagers and the operators involved in the community. Through the years several different types of formation for the operators have been done into and outside the community. Another important element to survive to the strong tension which characterise the community is the capability to be tolerant particularly in relation to the frustrating context in which one operates.

The main elements which characterise my style of action-research are: therapy, education, art and nature. Nature is certainly the element which I most remember during my formation. My personal experience begins when I was a child, often my parents used to bring me in wonderful places where I could stay in contact with nature; after this I have been initially formed and then worked as a maker/educator at the laboratory-house of Cenci , a hovel in Umbria where the research deals with the M.C.E., educational movement which inspires the practical education of C.Freinet…the experiences made in that place touched me deep inside and made me rise lots of questions on the lack of nature in our life and schools, and on the necessity to recreate a direct contact with it.

One of the things in which I’ve always believed since the community’s birth is that the contact with nature is very useful for the curative process and also during the therapy. The most important thing is the autonomy and the power of nature where we can find ourselves and our own  constitution. Every human being has always lived with the aspiration that all the things can be controllable, manageable, marketable; but now we have to learn that we must get in contact with nature and even more with people together with whom we can recreate relations and can help one each other. Nature as curative element: I’ve always thought it as a free old wise open book which we are not used to read anymore.

I believe that there is the necessity to wake up the ability to watch carefully, something which can recognise the different and distant elements and understand the consequences, just like our ancestors used to do watching at the sky understanding the signs which could be recognisable on the earth. That’s why nature can be an experience context which is in constant unpredictable development ad so it is different to the classic psychotherapy’s setting where the frame remains always neutral.

Nature as a curative context needs a constant effort and adaptation to live or even to survive. 

Since the opening of the community the idea of working in natural setting with all the teenagers, or just with a part of them, has always characterised  our way to deal and work with the  guests.

The interventions which have been carried out in the passing of time by singles, pairs or even group of educators have always seen the way of living together no more only in the community setting, but even in the natural setting too .For a certain period we used to go in a mountain hut (from a least of 2 nights to a maximum of 5).Here we have had important experiences in contact with nature in a place where  we used to get back with a certain regularity with the objective to let boys and girls experience their own personal creative process, and understand the rules which exist in a group. In other circumstances we have chosen different types of experiences in relation to the necessities of the guests: get down into a cave, go up again a torrent or even an iced waterfall, climb a rock. runs on the snow with dogsleds or  cross a river with a canoe, sleeping in tents or mountain huts.

Lots of things have already been told and written upon Art as a curative process. What we mean, into the community, is the  action which contains the chance to express what there is inside everyone of us: feelings, emotions, thoughts and visions, there are moments carried out by Art-therapists,(colour, music and singing),or artists and even by the educators which put a little bit of Art in the life of every day…my bet deals with the ability to discover Art in the simple things that we do in every day life, like to lay the table or cooking: Art as education to beauty.

Therapy, etymologically  “teraps”, means servant which represent the one who answer to the request of  help. The therapist , as Hyppocrate said ,is the one who respect his soul, the soul of whom is asking for help, others and the whole world too.

Education etymologically means the ability to let come out all the potentialities of our guests and ,moreover ,try to discover and get confident with those unconscious, good or evil, feelings and emotions which live inside him/her to reach a higher autonomy level. Education and therapy are both connected with learning something; when we recognise that one of one guests taught us something it certainly means that he/she has discovered something important too.

This consideration underlines the necessity of a constant formation, and of a constant growing desire both for the operator and for the therapist which try to find the best way to collaborate through their actions and thoughts. Education and therapy are both things which look for an interaction with the deepness of human beings. One of the main differences between is that the first is something that we should carry on day after day in our life, while the second is just something that we do only for a certain period in our life with those persons which recognise-or sometimes someone else recognise it for them-that they need a help.

There’s no distinction between sane or “mad”, nor for education’s subject and therapy’s subject too. Therapy  matches education which together are able to create the right conditions to save the precarious evolutionary  human balance. We might consider the insertion in a therapeutic community when just a therapy intervention is not sufficient.

Difficulties always raise when several educators and therapists must act on the same subject: how do we cooperate? Which are the main instruments that a work-group need? Who takes the decisions? How do we clearly define the roles of every figure and its work? In this first part that I wrote I wanted to express the importance of nature, but I’d like to underline that the main feature of the community is to do therapy, so education, Art and nature are things which characterise our way of doing therapy.

My personal vision of treatment exclude concepts like: recovery, strengthening, development, product, result, I try to use metaphors used in alchemy like: process, picture, reflection, fantasy, and verbs like: to resemble ,to cook, to digest, to echo, to clean, to repair and to recycle.   In the community the action-research is oriented to an handcraft approach, where it is hard to get back to humility, a little bit like S Francesco did, but at the same time being careful to the details.   Moore said: ”through tension we find vitality, and in paradox we find teachings, and walking and looking in the middle we learn wisdom and to believe in the confusion that variety creates. We become more self-confident”.  (1) 

From my point of view the community is like a human being, a place where meetings and encounters happen. It should be an open system delimited by a border which separates and at the same time deals with the external world, with families, with public services, with neighbours and so on…It is a place where to cohabitate, which is already hard in our culture and society, becomes harder and harder…It’s a place where we constantly try, and we do not always succeed in, to integrate an educative action with a therapeutic thinking. Another important thing which characterise our way of working is the  importance that we give to the observation of the connections and disconnections between the three levels of a human being: body, emotions and mind…we just don’t give importance to mind’s signs but to emotional and body signs too…signs which are usually put on an inferior level from an operative point of view.

The entrance in the community of minor ages guys happen after several previous contacts between the therapists of the community and the public services which ask for an insertion. Sometimes the request comes from municipal boards, especially neuropsychiatry services or even hospitals. In this first observation’s part we meet the public services, the parents-if it is possible-and the potential guest. The entrance into the community happens only if the under age guy understands even minimally why he/she will have to stay into the community. He/She might stay into the community for a period of time which goes from 1 to 3 years.

The definition of the permanence period help us to find the borders of the community identity: the risks that we have in not defining our identity is to be confused with a structure for chronic disturbs, a first aid or a hospital department. During all the permanence period we keep us constantly in contact with the services, the families and even with the towns the teenagers belong to for a work of cooperation an co-responsibility. The public services which ask for an insertion make up a very important part for our intervention: we have immediately understood how much important it is to explain and be clear on “who does” which are the borders of every entity  and how we must connect or even exchange in relation to our action. The public services present all different approach modalities with the community: sometimes they think we are savers, sometimes tired to handle hard situations they decide to abandon the teenagers, sometimes they want to take all the decision even on the therapy aspect and other times they try to use us as a first aid or as a hospital department. Looking at the approach that the public services have with our community we are already able to understand what the patient moves into the others…the family…

The more I think the more I realize how much difficult it is to explain and be exhaustive on how we  work into the community: it’s a complex system in constant development formed by other subsystems which relate one each other, inserted into a larger system which is the society, from towns to cities, from regions to nations and finally to the earth. The main life-space of the community is the house. Inside of it the life of every day plays a very important role for the whole treatment process. The community’s aim is to contain and listen their crisis, their hysteria and paranoia, their violence and silence, their insights and transgressions, and begin a curative process which can bring them to a higher autonomy level so that they could live a better life. In my opinion another important reflection relates with the causes which come from a certain kind of world that talk to us, and upon this I express my agreement with Hillman’s thought about “parental’ superstition” which brings back every problem of a person to a parent’s responsibility, looking especially to the mother figure. I think we should look better to the relationship with our grandparents ,which deals with that culture that connect us to our past and to the memory of our popular traditions handed down orally (not with a p.c.).Our action-research is characterised by an analogical intervention modality and by educational therapy experiments which deal with natural, imaginary, memory and biographic elements: the metaphoric language triggers from a psycho-physiological point of view, the right hemisphere, getting directly in contact with the unconscious; the tale and the construction of contexts and stories, the collection and the story of everyone’s biography, the use of backgrounds to represent, for  the community experience, a chance to learn and integrate  between different levels,   as conscious and unconscious, mind and body, deeply intense. In the community we have also experimented and structured actions and activities of education-therapy using the four natural elements: water, air, earth and fire: projects which have involved all the community components both guys and operators, therapists and educators. For certain seasonal periods we have chosen as background a particular element which have played a main role during all the interventions. Some years ago, for 9 months, for example we decided that “water” was the main element  and upon this we have developed lots of different activities connected to this theme, like: water-pictures, Art activities with water colours, myths and tales  about water, the construction of a pond with a fountain in the garden, a trip to Genoa’s aquarium, lyrics, songs and water’s sounds, informative  moments on the eco-utility of water, pool, thermal baths, the harvesting of water which we drunk at  meals from the sources near the community, excursions on Lambro river which is near to the previous seat of the community in Erba, jogging around Segrino’s  lake and finally baths and barbecues in tiny beaches of Como’s lake.

(1).G.E.Moore-opera