Fiorenzo Ranieri
Introduction
Places can be understood as contexts of life, concentrations of relationships and social practices, and areas of experience and meaning. In this sense, they influence the way we think, our consciousness, the course of our lives, our social structures, our health, and our well-being.
Place identity, a concept originating in environmental and social psychology (Proshansky et al., 1983), is a component of personal identity that emerges from our relationship with the physical, affective, and symbolic places of our existence. Also referred to as environmental identity (Ranieri, 2022), it is not a fixed map of the world, but rather a subjective geography of the Self, shaped by emotional attachment, loss, and transformation. Place identity is not a linear archive of past places, but a living network that is reactivated through memory, dreams, and play. It provides a relatively stable framework for the elaboration of the Self across different stages of development.
The formation of place identity is not linear, but is instead determined by interweaving connections, discontinuities, and lines of flight; in other words, it develops rhizomatically. In this process of identity formation, places interact with the subject according to a non-hierarchical organisation made up of emotional connections that are often unpredictable.
Attention to the relationship between psyche and space implicitly runs throughout the psychoanalytic tradition. Freud described mental functioning through topographical metaphors and spatial relationships between parts of the mind, conceiving the psyche as a structure articulated into regions, boundaries, and layers (Freud, 1939, pp. 337–446). Some authors have observed that Freudian psychoanalysis already contains the elements of a genuine “spatial psychology”, in which places, boundaries, and relationships of proximity contribute to the organisation of subjective experience (Dion, 2012, pp. 63–113).
Winnicott (1971, pp. 95–103) subsequently developed this intuition by introducing the concept of potential space, the intermediate space in which the child constructs play, symbolisation, and a relationship with reality. More recently, some authors have emphasised that the first place of psychic life is the body itself, the original space through which the subject begins to orient himself or herself in the world (Lemma, 2002). From this perspective, place identity can be understood as a progressive organisation of the relationships between body, space, and memory.
It has been suggested that basic spatial configurations emerge as a result of the subject’s movements in the struggle to obtain a space for experience: some of these configurations facilitate development, while others may undermine it. Such configurations would characterise both internal and external environments and contribute both to the constitution of identity and to the organisation of the social world (Hoggett, 1992).
In contexts of disorganised or traumatic development, when interaction with the human world does not support the growth of the mind, the relationship with the environment may also become distorted to the point of fragmentation and pulverisation, resulting in an alteration of the “sense of place”, that is, the sense of belonging and affective orientation towards places (Qazimi, 2014). At the same time, precisely when human relationships are chaotic, places — as internal representations that may be easier to manage emotionally — can offer continuity and a semblance of stability.
The psychotherapy room can become a node in the rhizome, a space for the co-creation and rewriting of identity, particularly through what has been interrupted, scattered, or left unspoken. Emotionally sharing the therapeutic experience with children or adolescents who have somehow lost the narrative of themselves and their world may make it possible to gather together the scattered fragments of their personal history. Dispersed points become a path, a trail to follow that can lead, at least, towards a renewed connection with oneself, with one’s body — the first place explored and the first place of identity (Lemma, 2010) — and with the many emotional contents associated with memories, familiar places, spaces inhabited in everyday life, languages heard, and human environments encountered.
In a historical period marked by difficult and, in some cases, catastrophic events, many families leave their countries of origin. Children and adolescents experience their place identity as altered, fragmented, exposed both to attacks from the surrounding world and to their own need to find a balance, sometimes through massive defensive mechanisms. Identity is also constructed through the places that have contained us, mirrored us, or wounded us. Some physical spaces, internalised as objects of the mind, may be lost through trauma; others, however, may be brought back to life through therapeutic care.
In this contribution, I propose a theoretical and clinical reflection through vignettes drawn from the treatment of two patients from very different geographical and social contexts. The two clinical cases share a fragmentation of place identity. Both treatments involved a process that made it possible to reconstruct a narrative of the self through the progressive rebuilding of bodily and environmental identity.
Case 1 – The Body as the First Habitable Place
Emma is a preadolescent born to an Italian father and a mother from an Asian family that had moved to Africa several generations earlier. Emma lived in Africa until the age of six, when the family moved to Italy so that she could begin school. For work-related reasons, her father remained in Africa until his daughter was nine, leaving the mother alone with two children in a country whose language she did not speak and without a significant social network.
When the parents came for consultation at the Public Health Service, Emma was about twelve years old. Her father travelled extensively for work and seemed angry with his fate. Her mother appeared subdued. Seven years after arriving in Italy, she spoke hardly any Italian. She did not work and spent most of her days at home. The parents described a girl who had changed greatly since childhood. Emma was irritable, sometimes aggressive, withdrawn from her family, struggling at school, increasingly inclined towards social withdrawal, and spending long periods using digital devices. At the end of the interview, I was struck by the fact that both parents expressed a desire to return to Africa.
Emma was assigned to a young psychologist under my supervision. During the first session, Emma said something about herself. In Africa she had attended school and remembered that all the children walked barefoot, engaged in activities that she had since forgotten. Her nursery school in Italy, by contrast, had benches and a large table for drawing and colouring.
The first sessions soon proved difficult. Emma spoke very little, avoided eye contact, and seemed annoyed by the psychologist’s presence. My colleague reported a strong sense of frustration and helplessness, together with the impression of being faced with a girl who was completely closed off and irritated at having to be there with her. We introduced paper and felt-tip pens.
The first drawings were disorganised: small circles scattered across the sheet, tangles of overlapping lines, repetitive marks occupying the space without forming recognisable shapes.
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Fig. 2 
Emma’s silence was almost total. These drawings evoked feelings of disorientation and uselessness in the psychologist, which we gradually began to understand as her emotional response to a fragmented psychic reality that was difficult to represent. The confused marks were telling us something about Emma.
Two distinct masses of colour then appeared, one red and one blue. We hypothesised that these figures represented isolated affective nuclei, polarities not yet integrated within psychic space. The representation did not yet concern people or places, but fields of experience that were difficult to organise symbolically. The psychologist’s initial frustration gradually gave way to a sense of curiosity and involvement.
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Later, for the first time, Emma began drawing parts of a face: sometimes blue eyes, at other times lips or noses. Gradually, these parts became organised until a face appeared.
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During one session, Emma also practised handwriting, trying to write her own name in the most pleasing way possible. She seemed to be searching for a representation of her identity.
In supervision, we had the impression that before Emma could tell stories about relationships or events in her life, she needed to construct a habitable representation of the body. In other words, the body had to become the first organised psychic place.
After the Christmas holidays, an almost complete body appeared for the first time. It was an adolescent figure with a slender form, initially without legs, with long hair covering the hands. The legs and feet were drawn on a second sheet.
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Fig. 10 
Emma slowly began to speak. The sessions became animated by brief conversations, often marked by ambivalence: moments of closeness alternated with requests for distance. New bodies were drawn, almost never complete. Then a whole figure appeared wearing distinctive shoes. In the following drawing, the feet disappeared.
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During this period, Emma spoke about her wish to start dancing. From then on, the sessions were filled with questions, drawings, and fantasies about ballet shoes: what they looked like, how they were worn, and which ones might be suitable for her. The therapeutic work became a space for exploring the relationship between body and place. The child who had walked barefoot in Africa now had to find a way of establishing contact with the ground through ballet shoes, which perhaps, more than anything else, represented the world she had encountered after moving to Italy.
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Fig. 16 
Gradually, the drawings gave way to dialogue and were almost entirely abandoned. Emma enrolled in dance classes while, during the same period, her mother found a job and developed new social relationships. The girl and her family seemed slowly to open themselves to the world. The last drawing (Fig. 16), before the definitive transition to verbal communication in the sessions, represented a landscape for the first time: mountains that were subsequently transformed into hills.
Case 2 – From the Pulverisation of Place to the Rebirth of the Mind
Sara is an adolescent who was adopted at the age of eleven and a half from a Baltic country, with a history of cumulative developmental trauma: severe neglect and isolation lasting for years, exposure to domestic violence, the traumatic death of her mother, her father’s imprisonment, and institutionalisation.
When I first met Sara at the age of thirteen and a half, what struck me was not only her emotional suffering, but a particular quality of her mental experience: a profound fragmentation of environmental identity.
Her story was repeated mechanically, “like a broken record”. Her memories were not organised into scenes, but into isolated fragments. Even the places of her childhood did not appear as inhabitable landscapes; instead, they emerged as city names in games of Hangman, flags to be guessed, and maps shown without emotional involvement. The clinical moment that best represented this condition was a series of drawings consisting of coloured dots scattered across the page.
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It seemed as though Sara’s memory had been pulverised. Place identity, understood as the affective integration of places into the construction of the self, appeared to be severely compromised. Years of cumulative trauma had not only damaged her bonds with primary figures. Sara’s very capacity to inhabit a coherent internal space had been altered.
During the first months of psychotherapy, Sara continually tested me: geography quizzes, flags, names of unfamiliar cities. I felt confused, disoriented, sometimes “stupid”. I forgot names, confused flags, and lost my bearings. My geographical confusion and mistakes greatly amused Sara — the teacher. In the countertransference, I was experiencing something very similar to her internal world: a loss of sense of place.
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I soon realised that the work did not consist in reconstructing her history, but in remaining within that fragmentation without withdrawing from it. The setting gradually took on the function of a stable and non-intrusive space, a reliable mental place where experience could be deposited without shattering.
Through play — especially recognition games, maps, and geography books — the patient began to share objects and places. She was not asking for correct information; she was looking for a mind capable of exploring with her. When I did not know, yet remained present, something began to change.
After the phase of the dots, traces appeared in the drawings. Lines. Paths. Roads. In one drawing, two felt-tip pens followed different trajectories, met, separated, and came together again. The word “trace” appeared. For the first time, we were no longer seeing only fragments, but connections. It was as though the psychologist’s willingness to tolerate confusion and uncertainty had begun to provide an internal spatial grid.
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Only in the second half of the therapy did a house appear. And inside the house, people. Using Lego constructions, the patient represented her original home and the violent dynamics that had taken place there. Before the traumatic scene could be narrated, it had been necessary to reconstruct the space. The sequence in our therapeutic journey seemed to move from fragments to traces, from landscape to home, and from home to relationships.
In this sense, the therapeutic place functioned as a space of reconstruction. For Sara, I was evidently not only a relational object, but also a transitional mental place in which fragments could be held together, allowing the reflective function damaged by countless traumatic experiences gradually to be repaired.
Towards the end of therapy, a particularly significant drawing appeared: a family tree in which the patient clearly distinguished her family of origin from her adoptive family. For the first time, the two forms of belonging were neither confused nor superimposed. If places can be distinguished, it becomes possible to conceive of a before and an after, and of a difference between old and new. Spatial reconstruction precedes and makes possible the reorganisation of identity.
In the final sessions, as separation approached, the patient represented me in two drawings. In the first, I was a clearly defined figure. In the second, I became a coloured spiral in motion. Separation can fragment. But the spiral is not fragmentation. It is continuous movement. It is a form that contains dynamism without dissolving. At that moment, I had the sense that the therapeutic place could be internalised not as a concrete presence, but as a transformative function.
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Trauma had produced a pulverisation: isolated points without coordinates. The therapeutic relationship provided a mind that could be used to contain, connect, and tolerate. The setting became a space of reconstruction. Reflective function could gradually be reactivated, to the point where separation itself could be represented.
Conclusions
The two clinical vignettes illustrate two different ways of working with place identity: in Emma’s case, the therapeutic process involved constructing a first habitable place within the body; in Sara’s case, psychotherapy addressed the reconstruction of a mental geography fragmented by trauma.
With Emma, the process initiated in psychotherapy involved progressively constructing a first habitable place. The body constituted the starting point of this process. Through graphic representation, the symbolic exploration of feet and shoes, and finally the concrete experience of movement through dance, the patient was able to construct a form of bodily identity that provided a basis for integrating her different cultural and relational forms of belonging.
Sara’s case suggests that, in severe developmental trauma, engaging with environmental identity and the sense of place may precede and facilitate work with primary objects. Places may at times be less persecutory and more accessible. Through the reconstruction of one’s internal geography, it becomes possible to reorganise one’s relational history as well.
(This paper was presented in the parallel sessions of the international conference “The Birth of the Mind in Relationship” – Florence, 2026.)
References
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