Tag: psychotherapy

The Hikikomori Body

Fiorenzo Ranieri

Paper presented at the conference “Solitude and Relationships”, organised by the Order of Psychologists of Tuscany on 22–23 January 2026 (proceedings available at:

https://www.fondazionepsicologi.it/quaderni/solitudine-e-relazioni-volume-2/)

Introduction

This contribution offers some reflections on the relationship that adolescents and young adults living in voluntary social withdrawal — commonly referred to in the literature as hikikomori — have with their own bodies. These observations draw on my clinical experience and on findings from the scientific literature. Further valuable insights emerged from the annual seminar The Hikikomori Phenomenon – A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Psychic and Social Withdrawal Across the Life Cycle, organised by the Martha Harris Study Centre in Florence and co-led with Dr Miriam Monticelli.

When we meet adolescents and young adults in social withdrawal, what strikes us is not only their absence from the world, but also a particular mode of bodily presence. The body is there — yet somehow withdrawn, suspended, as though it needed to pass unnoticed. Continue reading The Hikikomori Body

Place Identity: From Traumatic Fragmentation to Reconstruction in Psychotherapy

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

Borderline Personality Disorder with Severe Functional Impairment in Adolescence

Fiorenzo Ranieri

Fragility and change in borderline adolescence: understanding distress, supporting growth, and fostering continuity of the self.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) in adolescence is a complex clinical condition, often characterised by intense emotional distress, relational instability, and disorganised behaviour. When personality organisation is associated with low levels of functioning, difficulties manifest themselves with greater intensity and persistence, significantly interfering with the construction of the self, affect regulation, and developmental processes.

Continue reading Borderline Personality Disorder with Severe Functional Impairment in Adolescence