ABSTRACT
Towards the end of 2014 a Romanian Roma family came to Florence, Italy. Soon after their arrival, the police took away their four young children and put them in ‘care’.
This chapter tells the story of this family from the perspective of a Jungian analyst brought in to help the parents and to work alongside them through the many court appearances, indicating that psychoanalytic work can happen outside a consulting room.
This is a case, in my view, of ‘learned helplessness’, the parents being illiterate and unable to follow what is happening in the courts and with social services. I argue that after hundreds of years of enforced slavery in Romania, it is almost impossible to develop what we know as an individual ‘ego’.
I am forming a new understanding of an impoverished ego, unable to act. I argue that the State must protect such marginalized people and that when the State does not it is the task of citizens to stand up and behave as the State should.
