Antonella Sapio is a child psychiatrist who spent several years directing mental health services for children and adolescents. Her book recounts her time in one of these services: her attempts to fit in, the obstacles she faced, her brave refusal to accept what cannot be accepted, and the personal and professional growth that followed. It is a compelling read. Many of us have lived through the difficulties she describes, entertained the reflections she raises, and then stopped ourselves from pursuing them out of fear. But this book is far more than a catalog of shared troubles. Sapio examines herself, her world, and her work as if under a microscope in a laboratory. She reflects, and she makes you reflect.
Her observations cut deep. She critiques the cult of psychoanalysis as currently practiced in certain public institutions—and the way "responsibility" gets pinned on the suffering individual at the expense of understanding the wider social context in which he or she lives. Take a child who has no appetite for school, brings home poor grades, rebels against family. Is he disturbed? Or is he resisting a society where wealth and career are the only values that count? Could it be that the supposedly "healthy" are the ones carrying a generalized sickness produced by those very values? Didn't Freud himself write that psychoanalysis aimed to move people from neurosis to mere ordinary unhappiness?
Sapio's objection is not that unhappiness doesn't exist. It is that we have relegated to last place the values essential to human flourishing—values that bring joy: recognition of another person as they are, relationships lived in truth, the courage to resist, listening, a smile, the curiosity to try new paths, contemplation of time in its ever-changing flow, the beauty of certain singular moments. She writes: "The construction of an alternative to the Western system of living and relating cannot take form except as a renewed proposal for ways of sharing life no longer founded on the consumption of objects and people, but on the capacity to experience genuine and real reciprocity of need—and genuine and real gratitude for the beauty of simplicity in living."
The relentless pace of our world and the expectations it places on us, both collective and personal, can be suffocating. They ask of us what we cannot, what we must not surrender without paying the price of an "ordinary unhappiness" whose very source we have often forgotten how to see.
Natalia Livi, 2000