I chaired this symposium on the concept of belonging in social psychiatry. My contribution was entitled: "Belonging Without Boundaries: Social Psychiatry in the  21st Century"

1. Primary Care, Mental
Health and Public Health
Integration
• WPA Bucharest Congress
• “Innovation & Excellence”
• April 10, 2013

2. Belonging Without Boundaries:
Social Psychiatry in the
21st Century
Co-chairs:
Vincenzo Di Nicola
Rachid Bennegadi

3. A Symposium
on Belonging
Panelists:
Vincenzo Di Nicola
Ileana-Mihaela Botezat-
Antonescu
Drozdstoj Stoyanov
Annelle Primm

4. A Symposium
on Belonging
Panelists:
Vincenzo Di Nicola:
“Belonging Without Boundaries:
Settlers, Sojourners and Travellers
in the 21st Century”

5. A Symposium
on Belonging
Panelists:
Ileana-Mihaela Botezat-
Antonescu:
“Belonging to the Group of Psychotherapy
Professionals: Between Interdiction and
Proliferation in Different Political Contexts
in Romania”

6. A Symposium
on Belonging
Panelists:
Drozdstoj Stoyanov:
“Belonging Dimensions in Psychological
Climate and Personality as Predictors of
Vulnerability to Burn-out”

7. A Symposium
on Belonging
Panelists:
Annelle Primm:
“Belonging by Bridging Divergent Worlds”

8. A Symposium
on Belonging
Discussant:
Rachid Bennegadi

9. Special Thanks
Eliot Sorel
Pierre Loebel

10. Geopoliticus child watching the birth
of the new man
– Dali

11. Belonging Without Boundaries:
Social Psychiatry in the
21st Century
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to
cross the border beyond which everything loses
meaning: love, convictions, faith, history.
Human life—and herein lies its secret—takes
place in the immediate proximity of that border,
even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away,
but a fraction of an inch.
– Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting

12. Belonging Without
Boundaries:
Settlers, Sojourners and
Travellers in the 21st Century
Vincenzo Di Nicola

13. Belonging …

14. Belonging Without Boundaries:
Settlers, Sojourners and Travellers
in the 21st Century
Vincenzo Di Nicola
MPhil, MD, PhD, FRCPC, FAPA
• Psychologist (McGill/London)
• Child Psychiatrist (McGill/Ottawa)
• Philosopher (McMaster/McGill/EGS)
• Professor – Université de Montréal/
UFRGS – Brazil
• Chief – Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont

15. Belonging Without Boundaries:
Settlers, Sojourners and Travellers
in the 21st Century
Vincenzo Di Nicola
• Mid-career child psychiatrist and
early-career philosopher
• Tender-minded vs tough-minded
–William James
• An Italian heart, an Anglo-Saxon brain
and a Jewish soul

16. Key words
• Belonging
• Social psychiatry
• Relational being vs individual identity

17. Pedagogical objectives
1. To propose belonging as a key notion
for social psychiatry

18. Pedagogical objectives
2. To offer an overview of the aporias*
imbricated in thinking about
belonging
* Aporia – Gk: impasse, confusion,
puzzlement

19. “The Church of God sojourning in Rome to the Church of God
sojourning in Corinth.” — Clement’s
Letter to the Corinthians
• paroikousa – Gk: a provisional abode,
“sojourning”
• katokein – Gk: the citizen with a
residence
• parokein – to sojourn like a stranger
• katokein – to reside like a citizen

20. “The Church of God sojourning in Rome to the Church of God
sojourning in Corinth.” – Clement’s
Letter to the Corinthians
Message:
• The Church itself was not a permanent
structure but a sojourn
• Christians live in messianic time

21. 20th Century
• Displacements across borders, languages
and cultures
• Emigrants, immigrants, migrants
• From displaced persons (DPs) to refugees
• From law to literature, from politics to
philosophy, and from psychiatry to
psychoanalysis

22. 20th Century
• “Global flows” – Rand Corp
• Social psychiatry & social medicine
• Public health & epidemiology
• Transcultural psychiatry & medical
anthropology
• Ethnicity & culture
• Multiculturalism

23. 21st Century
• From a bipolar world and the Cold War
rhetoric of the end of history (Francis
Fukuyama) to a multicentric world of
liquid modernity (Zygmunt Bauman)
• Where culture has replaced class as the
dominant signifier
• Language as the major expressive vehicle
of this shift

24. 21st Century
• From multiculturalism to globalization
• From diversity to pluralism
• From transcultural psychiatry to
global mental health

25. Whither belonging?
Belonging is now a critical issue for
• Sociocultural psychiatry
• Global mental health

26. What is belonging?
• Belonging has a bi-valent, ambiguous,
deeply unresolved/unresolvable quality
• What philosophy calls an aporia – a puzzle

27. Sojourners vs settlers
• We can begin to describe this puzzle with the
dichotomy settlers or sojourners
• Katokein – those who are “here” to settle
• Parokein – those who sojourn for work or
other reasons, for shorter or longer
periods, but do not make their home
“there”

28. Liminality
Third state of being-in-the-world …
• Intermediate between sojourners who are
passing through and settlers who plant
roots
• Those still on the journey, in transit –
“betwixt and between” (Victor Turner)
• Neither here nor there –
travellers on the threshold

29. Liminality
Travellers on the threshold …
• Stato di eccezione, state of exception

30. State of exception
• Giorgio Agamben (b. Rome, 1942)

31. State of exception
• Giorgio Agamben (b. Rome, 1942)
• Key notions:
• Homo sacer/Sacred Man (1998)
• Stato di eccezione, État d’exception,
State of Exception (2005)

32. Liminalitas vs
communitas
Liminality
(threshold being/state of exception)
vs
Community
(settler/citizen)

33. What is belonging?
• Whether it accompanies a language, a nation,
a profession, or other organizing system of
meaning
• The construct of belonging can be more than
an aporia for imagining identity
• To achieve the definition of subject and
subjectivity

34. What is belonging?
• “Belonging” is a way of rethinking relational
and social being
• How we define mental health
• How we understand the expression of its
vicissitudes
• How we organize care and healing for
sufferers

35. What is belonging?
To do this …
• We need to recognize how belonging is
experienced and negotiated
• Free of the constraints of our habitual patterns
of practice and thought
• To imagine belonging without borders for
settlers, sojourners and travellers in the
21st century

36. Some negations
What belonging is not and cannot be …
• Belonging is not identity
(belonging is not simply part of personal
being, cf. Rom Harré)
Cf. Amin Maalouf, Les Identités meurtrières/
In the Name of Identity: Violence and the
Need to Belong (1998/2000)

37. Some negations
What belonging is not and cannot be …
• Belonging cannot be bounded by geographic
or any other kind of boundaries
(eg, nation-state)
• Nor reduced to home, physically defined
(cf. house/home; patria, homeland, heimat)

38. Some negations
What belonging is not and cannot be …
• Belonging cannot be disembodied
(virtual reality, the internet or other
simulacra; cf. Jean Baudrillard)
• Corollary: Neither metaphor nor metonymy
can instantiate or describe belonging
(ie, belonging is neither a metaphoric nor
a metonymic relation, neither a
displacement nor a condensation of affects
and cognitions, and cannot be described as
such)

39. Some negations
What belonging is not and cannot be …
• Belonging cannot be exhausted, explained or
contained by notions of ethnicity or other
associations
(eg, race, religion/system of belief,
ideology, profession, gender, sexuality,
or intellectual/other cultural traditions)

40. Some negations
What belonging is not and cannot be …
• Belonging cannot be defined by essentialist,
reductive, deterministic or other
causalistic models

41. Some negations
What belonging is not and cannot be …
• Belonging is not ownership
(regardless of the lexical origins or
deconstructive meanings of the term in
English or other languages, belonging
cannot be conflated with ownership and
must be specifically separated from any
notion of ownership, slavery or any other
materialistic enterprise)

42. Some affirmations
What belonging is and possibly must be …
• Belonging is part of social being
(cf. Rom Harré)

43. Some affirmations
What belonging is and possibly must be …
• Belonging is proposed as a key notion of
social and cultural psychiatry
(not a subset of psychiatry but a larger
and more embracing definition of
psychiatry)

44. Some affirmations
What belonging is and possibly must be …
• Belonging is a critically important aspect of
developmental psychology (cf. Jerome
Kagan) and child and adolescent
psychiatry
• With implications for developmental
psychopathology (cf. Sir Michael Rutter)

45. Some affirmations
What belonging is and possibly must be …
• Belonging can embrace and contextualize
such specific approaches as attachment
theory and systemic or family therapy
(belonging has no parentheses or
brackets)

46. Some affirmations
What belonging is and possibly must be …
• Belonging can address the irreducibly
philosophical* question of defining the
subject
* philosophical = metaphysical or ontological

47. Some affirmations
What belonging is and possibly must be …
• Belonging is contingent (ie, chance, not fate),
non-essentialist,
non-deterministic,
non-causalistic,
and fundamentally irreducible

48. Some affirmations
As a result …
• Belonging is synonymous with fidelity to an
Event, which generates both subject and
belonging

49. The science of being:
Ontology
• Alain Badiou (b. Rabat, 1937)

50. The science of being:
Ontology
• Alain Badiou (b. Rabat, 1937)
• Key notions:
• Theory of the Subject (1982/2009)
• Being and Event (1988/2005)
• Logics of Worlds (2006/2009)

51. Reflexions
Belonging is to social psychiatry what
attachment is to child psychiatry

52. Reflexions
Belonging is a bridge between the
individual and the community
(ie, between personal being and
social being)

53. Belonging …

54. Contact Vincenzo Di Nicola
• Blog – Trauma & Event:
http://philoshrink.blogspot.ca/
• Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/
dinicola.vincenzo