ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop some reflections on the intense experiences in working in Kosovo between the summers of 1999 to date. The psychosocial concept proposed is an attempt to overcome the traditional means of assessing and dealing with the problem of trauma, and to reconsider it within its socio–political context. In cases of humanitarian intervention after a conflict, it is easy to feel immersed in a universe that is considered “abnormal”, and to therefore assume an attitude which attempts to readapt the individuals affected by or involved in the conflict. At the inception of humanitarian intervention programmes lie some basic common assumptions. One of the main tasks of the clinicians intervention in Kosovo was, indeed, the attempt to alter the disabling effects of this limiting constellation. Paradoxically the magical belief in “science” and in the power of the international scientific community is so strong that it tends to marginalize local knowledge.
