Identity building in girls from migrant families

In the article the author, a psychiatrist expert in clinical work with migrant adolescents and their families, focuses her attention on the problems concerning the body of "second generation" migrant girls. The body, an important element of communication for adolescents in general, becomes a place of choice for these girls to express conflict and suffering, revealing the rupture of meaning that often occurs after the traumatic event of migration, experienced by the whole family. Hence suicide attempts and pathologies that translate directly on the body, such as mutilations, scars, marks. With a trained look at a bifocal vision, which continuously passes from a "western" psychiatric and psychological reading to a transcultural one, through the consultation process practiced in the French structures she directs, the author illustrates two cases of adolescent daughters of migrant parents, whose path towards the acquisition of their identity has led to traumas and sufferings expressed mainly through the body.