Published: March 2023

Keywords:
Voices, Psychosis, Refugees, Clinic, Detention Center, Lesvos, Survivors, Polyphony, Dialogicality, Metalanguage, Autopoiesis, Recursiveness, Cultural, Doctors Without Borders, Beer, Bakhtin, Maturana, Milan.

Dimitris Triantafyllou

Dimitris Triantafyllou is a clinical psychologist - psychotherapist.

He is a graduate of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Patras and of the Department of Clinical Psychology of the Université Paris VII (Diderot) with postgraduate studies in Clinical Psychology (Master - Paris VII) and in Psycholinguistics (MSc - University of Edinburgh). He has worked since 2016 in the field of humanitarian crisis, with refugee populations, and in Doctors Without Borders until 2019. Currently, he is a staff psychologist at the European Asylum Agency (EUAA) providing psychological support to workers in the Asylum and First Reception Services.

Dimitris.triant@yahoo.gr

Abstract

The article presents a psychotherapeutic method applied in 2018, at the Doctors Without Borders Clinic in Lesvos, during the treatment of refugees with acute psychotic symptoms. This method utilizes the voices of individuals, as they are expressed through psychotic symptoms, inviting the clinic visitors to enter into a dialogue with their inner voices and with the voices of the context, while taking the position of an active observer and interlocutor, exploring the following question: How can the recursive and self-reflective nature of the interactions within the individual's system of voices, regardless of the form they may take, be used as a trigger for reorganizing the positions these voices occupy and re-framing the meanings they carry, so that the person is led to the creation of new autopoietic and auto-regulatory internal structures? The purpose of the article is,also, to extend the discussion regarding the use of voices in different contexts.