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. Continue reading Place Identity: From Traumatic Fragmentation to Reconstruction in Psychotherapy