“Bits and Pieces”: Building a Family on 3 Continents, A Story of Italian Migration

SECOND THOUGHTS

As I approach my 50th column in my “Second Thoughts” series and mark the end of my triennium (2022-25) as President of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP), I will soon wrap up my mini-series on “Terms of the Social” then top it off with a relational dialogue with Professor Norman Sartorius, MD, PhD, who has greatly influenced social psychiatry and has been called “psychiatry’s living legend” by The Lancet. A number of other dialogues are lined up as well.

As an introduction to my next focus on migration, I want to tell my own story as an Italian immigrant, married to a Brazilian immigrant, living in Canada, and its implications for thinking about migration and working with migrants. I have already written a column about migration, setting out the larger canvas for thinking about the movement of individuals around the world through the theory of American philosopher of motion Thomas Nail. This one is more personal but be sure, I want to make some strong and more far-reaching statements.

Firstly, I believe that we are in crisis of representation in the world today. From “cultural appropriation” to “cancel culture,” my concern about our descent into “identity politics” is that no one can represent anyone else, especially from another group. Well, so much for the counterfactuals that I discussed in a recent column as the heart of literature; so much for fiction, for acting, and for art. So, as my fellow Abruzzese Ignazio Silone wrote about how we speak Italian in our region of Italy, I have the right to tell my own story in my own way. Born and raised in Italy to which I return regularly and with an Italian extended family on 3 continents, I will tell our story in my own voice with authenticity and integrity, and not echo the dogmas and pieties of either Italy or our host countries.

Secondly, in telling my story, I will test it (in later columns) against models of migration and intercultural encounters, from acculturation to assimilation to the emergent Western orthodoxy of diversity. In particular, I will test my story against my own model of cultural family therapy and the cultural formulation interview. Cultural psychiatry, in which I have been so immersed all of my career, sheds little light about Italian culture in Italy or in the Italian diaspora—the “little Italies” of the world—while the real social discriminators that separate Italy’s north and south and spotlight the difference between the experience of being Italian in Canada or the US vs in Brazil or Mexico are left in absolute darkness.

Bits and Pieces

The migrant has become the political figure of our time.

– Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant¹

American philosopher of movement, Thomas Nail,^1,2 argues that migration is the rule, not the exception in human history and that we need a new psychology and a new politics of movement—a kinopsychology and a kinopolitics. Italian emigration since the founding of modern Italy is one of the great stories of the contemporary world.^3,4 There is hardly a town in Italy that has not sent out its natives sons and daughters to other lands. And what would such cities as São Paulo and Buenos Aires be without their Italian immigrants? Or Montreal, Chicago, and New York?

My family story is just one specific instance of the many reasons why Italians looked beyond Italy for an economically better life. Born in Abruzzo, my father felt alienated from his own family and culture after the Second World War and sought refuge both in leftist politics and in migration. Partly of his own doing, partly due to circumstances, he got caught in the “wheel of history” or “the force of destiny” to use Giuseppe Verdi’s phrase from my father’s favorite opera and abandoned my mother soon after I was conceived. He had a brief second life in Venezuela and a longer life with a new family in Brazil. This is a story I have related in installments from my first meeting with him—“Strangers no more: A family therapist meets his father”⁵—to my last letter to him after his death—“Intimate strangers.”⁶

At the Table

Like every family story, the particulars have shaped my life and my search to bring together the bits and pieces of my family is my own personal journey and the subject of my investigations as a child psychiatrist, family therapist, and philosopher.^7-16

I was raised by my mother and her family, in Italy for my first 6 years, then in Canada, where we immigrated to join the rest of the family that had already left Italy. My education was in English in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the US, with sojourns in Rome and Milan for my family therapy training. In fact, when I did the “Practicum in Family Therapy” in 1987 with Maurizio Andolfi, MD, there were several Brazilians in the group who offered their understanding and support for me to go to meet my father in Brazil. And yet, it took me 7 years—and a crisis in my life—to do it.

When I met my Italian father Giuseppe for the first time in Brazil at the age of 41, with my 10-year old Carlo, he asked me what I do. I told him I work with children and families across cultures, especially immigrants and traumatized individuals. “So you are working on your own case,” was his witty summary. The most powerful message from that journey was not my father’s first words in Italian at the airport in São Paulo, Perdonami, figlio—“Forgive me, son”—as poignant as they were. Rather, it was the words of my newfound Brazilian sister Carmen Silvana, who said that she had known about me since we were children and that there had always been a place for me at the table of my family in Brazil.^5,6,9

I am a fortunate person. I had the means and the stability in my life to find my place at that table and I took it. It eventually led me to a second marriage to a fifth generation Italian Brazilian from southern Brazil. My fiancée, Letícia Castagna Lovato, met my father, but by the time we got married, he had passed away. At our wedding, I brought together my own Italian family from 3 continents—Italy, Canada, and Brazil—with Letícia’s Italian Brazilian family. Nena, my mother, and Nina Mara, my daughter from my first marriage, were there as were all of my father’s grandchildren from Brazil and Italy. Letícia and I called our daughter, Anita Sofia, inspired by Anita Garibaldi and my love of philosophy.⁶

The Right to Tell Your Own Story

We leave to each person the right to tell their own story in their own way.

– Ignazio Silone, Fontamara (my translation)¹⁷

And what is the moral of the story? You can believe in fate and the force of destiny, as my father Giuseppe did—as does my wife Letícia who believes that a higher power brought us together—or you can believe as I do that you make your own destiny by ascribing meaning to the accidents and traumas of your life. This is mine.

The Story of Family Migrations: 7 Lessons at the Crossroads of Family Studies, Society and Culture, Identity, and Belonging

Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for him in foreign, unpossessed places.

– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities¹⁸

1. The Human Story As a Story of Migration

Migration is the rule rather than the exception across the world and across history. American philosopher Thomas Nail^1,2 has created a philosophy of movement and called for a psychology of movement—kinopsychology—and a politics of movement—kinopolitics. Movement exposes us to change and diversity, creating multiplicity and pluralism.

My work as a child and family psychiatrist and socio-cultural psychiatrist focuses on migrant and refugee families and their attempted adaptations in new worlds. I have specialized in trauma with many studies. With each child, with each family, with each predicament, I try to build an empathic bridge between their experiences and mine, reaching back to my own complex family story. I sometimes share that with them and I believe it gives us greater access to their own reserves and resources for adaptation.

2. “Addition, Not Subtraction”

In the face of multiplicity and plurality, I adopted this slogan. In spite of that, sometimes when we open one door, others close behind us. To put it differently, as Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges put it in his short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,”¹⁹ we are in a woods with trees in front of us where each one presents us with a choice. We can go to the left or the right. These choices can be capricious or random or they can be shaped by past experience, modeling, ideology, mentoring, and family patterns. Yet, they represent both a radical potentiality (potenza as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has described it)²⁰ and the accumulated weight of our choices, history, families, societies, and cultures. Finally, I reach for integration and synthesis across disciplines and domains.

3. Attachment

Sigmund Freud, MD, once said that, “It seems to have been my fate to discover only the obvious: that children have sexual feelings, which every nursemaid knows.”²¹And it was John Bowlby, MD’s destiny to name as attachment what every grandmother knows about the love between mother and child.²² We have an open, perhaps endless capacity for creating attachment bonds. No doubt, this capacity is facilitated by the early, transgenerational familial transmission of resources via attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and interpersonal perceptions and patterns.

4. Family Culture

There are five of us children. We live in different cities now, some of us abroad, and we do not write to each other much. When we meet we can be indifferent and aloof. But one word, one phrase is enough, one of those ancient phrases, heard and repeated an infinite number of times in our childhood. … for us to pick up in a moment our old intimacy and our childhood and youth, linked indissolubly with these words and phrases. One of them would make us recognize each other, in the darkness of a cave or among a million people. … These phrases are the foundation of our family unity which will persist as long as we are in this world …

– Natalia Ginzburg, Family Sayings²³

Natalia Ginzburg in her autobiography, Family Sayings,²³ showed how words and phrases, capturing childhood experience and shared family experiences create a family culture. The evolution of my work reveals that I have moved from systems to culture to the event.^8-16 My first synthesis argued for integrating family therapy with cultural psychiatry.⁹ With that book, I moved from seeing the family as a system to seeing the family as a culture.

5. Negotiating Values

Migrants find themselves constantly negotiating values among themselves and their host countries, reconciling the values of their lands, cultures, and religions of origin with the places of sojourn and settlement. The World Values Survey produces the Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map.²⁴ It maps survival versus self-expression values on the x-axis and traditional versus secular values on the y-axis.

Let us situate my family’s 3 countries on the Inglehart-Welzel map of cultural values.²⁴ Canada is the country that is the most secular of the 3 countries and values self-expression the most. Italy is well above the mean or middle of survival vs self-expression values and just above the mean of traditional vs secular values, while Brazil is exactly in the middle of the survival vs self-expression values and just below the mean of traditional vs secular values.

6. Threshold/Event

I can summarize all of my work with children and families this way: working with families on the threshold—migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and minorities in majority cultures—and helping them to integrate once they arrive and try to integrate into society where they can experience the event that will change their lives.^16,25,26

7. Identity/Belonging

In my exposure to migrations, to change, to shifting attachments and family cultures, negotiating values on the threshold between worlds, I have arrived at a provisional identity and a sense of belonging in the world, which is the event of my life.

I can express it in this formula:

I have an Italian heart, an Anglo-Saxon brain, a Jewish soul, and a Brazilian family.

The identity we adopt cannot deny our origins, nor should it be limited to them. As French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus said about Italian writer Ignazio Silone (the pen name of Secondino Tranquilli) from Pescina, my father’s home town in the Abruzzo, “Look at Silone. He is radically attached to his land, yet he is so European.”¹⁷

For this reason, I want to close with British historian Theodore Zeldin’s beautiful assertion about the human family²⁷ …

I see humanity as a family that has hardly met.

Resources

For a perspective on Italian culture, society and migrations, I recommend:

• Luigi Barzini. The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring their Manners and Morals. Touchstone; 1996.
• Robert F. Foerster. The Italian Emigration of Our Times. Arno Press; 1969.
• Thomas Sowell T. Italians around the world. In: Migrations and Cultures: A World View. Basic Books; 1996:140-174.

For insights into how Italians adapt to other cultures and societies, I am fond of smaller scale, local studies, such as these:

• Robert F Harney, Vincenza Scarpaci. Little Italies in North America. Multicultural History Society of Ontario; 1981.
• Suzana Barretto Ribeiro. Italianos do Brás: Imagens e Memórias: 1920-1930. Editora Brasiliense; 1994.

For a world historical overview of migrations, see the work of Thomas Nail:

• Thomas Nail. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford University Press; 2015.
• Thomas Nail. Theory of the Border. Oxford University Press; 2016.

Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addictology at the University of Montreal. He is also clinical professor of psychiatry & behavioral health at The George Washington University and past president of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). Dr Di Nicola has received numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships. Of note, Dr Di Nicola was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS), given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and is a Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists (FACPsych) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). His work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s publications include: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021).

Acknowledgement

This essay is based on an invited presentation in Italian, “Pezzi e spezzi: come costruire una famiglia in tre paesi—una storia di migrazione italiana”(Bits and Pieces: How to Build a Family in Three Countries—A Story of Italian Migration), for the 64th Study Conference, “Migrants and Migrations: Family and Community Resilience,” organized by the Family Therapy Academy, delivered at The Seraphicum—Pontifical Theological Faculty of Saint Bonaventure, in Rome, Italy on July 5, 2025.

References

1. Nail T. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford University Press; 2015.
2. Nail T. Theory of the Border. Oxford University Press; 2016.
3. Foerster RF. The Italian Emigration of Our Times. Arno Press; 1969.
4. Sowell T. Italians around the world. In: Migrations and Cultures: A World View. Basic Books; 1996:140-174.
5. Di Nicola V. Strangers no more. The Family Therapy Networker. November‑December 1996:38‑46.
6. Di Nicola V. Intimate strangers—There is no dark fate or bright destiny, only things that happen. Aeon (online magazine). April 13, 2020. Accessed April 4, 2026. https://aeon.co/essays/there-is-no-dark-fate-or-bright-destiny-only-things-that-happen
7. Andolfi M, Di Nicola V. Sezione: Dove sta andando la terapia familiare nel mondo? Sulle soglie ... tra l’essere singolare e plurale, il visibile e l’invisibile, il trauma e l’evento. Un dialogo relazionale fra Vincenzo Di Nicola e Maurizio Andolfi [Section: What’s happening in family therapy around the world? On the threshold … between singular and plural being, the visible and the invisible, trauma and the event. A relational dialogue between Vincenzo Di Nicola and Maurizio Andolfi]. Terapia Familiare. 2014;106:93-111.
8. Di Nicola V. The strange and the familiar: Cross‑cultural encounters among families, therapists, and consultants. In: Andolfi M, Haber R, eds., Please Help Me With This Family: Using Consultants as Resources in Family Therapy. Brunner/Mazel; 1994:33‑52.
9. Di Nicola V. A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy. Foreword by Maurizio Andolfi, MD. W.W. Norton & Co; 1997.
10. Di Nicola V. Nuove realtà sociali, nuovi modelli di terapia: Terapia familiare culturale per un mondo in trasformazione [New social realities, new models of therapy: cultural family therapy for a changing world]. Terapia Familiare. 1997;54:5‑9.
11. Di Nicola V. Famiglie sulla soglia. Città invisibili, identità invisibili [Families on the threshold: Invisible cities, invisible identities]. In: Andolfi M, ed. Famiglie Immigrate e Psicoterapia Transculturale [Immigrante Families and Transcultural Psychotherapy]. FrancoAngeli; 2004.
12. Di Nicola V. Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. Foreword by Maurizio Andolfi, MD. Atropos Press; 2011.
13. Di Nicola V. “Dalla Soglia all’Evento: Lo Svolgimento della Terapia Familiare Culturale” [From the Threshold to the Event: The Growth of Cultural Family Therapy], Giornata di Lezioni Teoriche [Academic Study Day], Accademia della Psicoterapia della Famiglia [Family Therapy Academy], Seraphicum Facoltà Teologica S. April 9, 2016.
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16. Di Nicola V, J Farnsworth J. Changing the subject: From system to culture to the event, In: Andolfi M, D’Elia A, Fraenkel P, eds. International Family Systems Therapy: Global Perspectives on the Healing Power of Families. Routledge; 2025:269-280.
17. Silone I. Fontamara. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore; 1949.
18. Calvino I. Invisible Cities, Weaver W, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1974.
19. Borges JL. The Garden of Forking Paths. In: Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New Directions; 1962: (Spanish original 1941)
20. Agamben G. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Heller-Roazen D, ed & trans. Stanford University Press; 2000.
21. Jones E. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. Basic Books; 1953-57.
22. Bretherton I. "The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth". Developmental Psychology. 1992;28(5):759-775.
23. Ginzburg N. Family Sayings (Revised from the original translation by Low DM). Arcade/Little, Brown; 1989. (Italian original 1963)
24. The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map—World Values Survey 7 (2023). Accessed April 13, 2026. http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/
25. Di Nicola V. Badiou, the Event, and Psychiatry, Part 1: Trauma and Event. Blog of the American Philosophical Association, November 23, 2017. Accessed April 13, 2026. https://blog.apaonline.org/2017/11/23/badiou-the-event-and-psychiatry-part-1-trauma-and-event/
26. 26.Di Nicola V. Badiou, the event, and psychiatry, part 2: psychiatry of the event. Blog of the American Philosophical Association. November 30, 2017. Accessed April 13, 2026. https://blog.apaonline.org/2017/11/30/badiou-the-event-and-psychiatry-part-2-psychiatry-of-the-event/
27. Zeldin T. An Intimate History of Humanity. Minerva Paperbacks; 1995.