The life of relationship in globalized financial economic devices. Evidences from the experience of a group-analytic transcultural workshop.

Abstract

Summary The present contribution - starting from the experience of the EATGA Workshop 2011 that took place in Palermo, whose theme was “Intersubjective bonds in a globalized economy”- invites reflection on the quality of the life of relationships and intersubjective connectedness in the social contemporary world. One of the characterizing cultural phenomena influencing contemporary reality is made up of the dominant and pervasive presence of the logic and language of the financial markets in policies and activities that organize and articulate daily life. The theoretical hypothesis driving our research is that the structures of subjectivity, the meaning and the way of being in a relationship are characteristics (cultural themes) that emerge within a historically defined cultural system/device. In such a theoretical perspective, the cultural themes (i.e. gift, market,) are incorporated or interiorized by men belonging to a shared cultural system and so become elements of the shared subjectivity and of the meanings given to intersubjective exchanges and bonds. From the workshop experience some meanings emerge concerning the role of the economical-financial system in promoting codes and symbols that define the shape and the sense of relationships. The cultural codes of the market have come out of the economic circle in which they have originated and are offered as organizers of affections and of relationships. This denotes and marks the current critical historical moment, in which the values and the cultural codes organized on trust, on reciprocity, on community participation and solidarity seem to be interdicted.