Matteo Lancini: « Youth violence was born from the inability to express fears and fragility »

«To explain the phenomenon of youth violence, it is necessary to go beyond the hypersemplified vision with which we tend to observe and judge it by looking for models, often in the digital world, to which the responsibility of having influenced violent behavior. In reality, the violence of our boys, expressed more and more through the blades, is increasing not only against others, but also against themselves and the reasons, which are always there, are to be found in deep « , he explains to Courier the psychologist Matteo Lanciniauthor of the book « Call me me adult » (Raffaello Cortina Editore), in which he also deals with the theme of solitude that becomes ferocity of the Z.

Thus acts the violent always have a motivation?
« The motive is always there and has to do with a form of despair, of impossibility to express the emotions that become, at a certain point, disruptive. It is an emotional fragility that when it captures the most fragile, when it remains silent, if it does not find a space of sharing with the other it turns into desperate gesture « .

Why do many guys leave the house with the knives?
«The blade in your pocket protects them from external and internal demons. Behind these violent phenomena there is a profound form of fragility mixed with fear and frustration. They are subjects moved by the desire not to be cataloged as weak and frightened people but as strong and the weapon is a symbolic object that allows you to confirm this value. It is as if, by stabbing the other, he stabbed his fragility that is thus put silent ».

Are they moved, therefore, by the need for affirmation?
« The boys who express themselves with a knife is as if they passed from a passive condition, from feeling inadequate, to a condition that allows you to » get back on equal « , to find thanks to what psychoanalysis calls » mature recovery fantasy « , a state in which to feel protagonists. It is as if the weapon they have in hand allowed them to overturn the emotional situation experienced with great frustration, through the submission of the other. Behind these behaviors, if they are not attributable to stories of marginalization and crime, there is anger that at some point becomes devastating violence. To understand these unspeakable acts, it is necessary to read the signs of suffering and profound discomfort behind them, so much so that the result is that the young man who performs these violence, in addition to hurting someone seriously, also ruins his life ».

How to prevent disturbing emotions, if repressed, become desperate actions?
«The real prevention is to make their fragility express their fragility. These violent acts are not the result of a premeditated plan. We must help the boys recognize and express what they feel but also help them protect themselves from their fears and insecurities, only in this way can they find streets of vent without resorting to violence ».

What do the reference adults are wrong?
«The boys feel alone, there is something that is not working in the emotional plot that regulates relationships. The authentic relationship is missing which is much more than listening, but it is the feeling that there is someone with whom you can put your emotions in question, even the terrible ones and of which you are ashamed or those that can hurt. But not only. The boys need to experience with the body. Today a pre -adolescent that is not stopped at school is considered agitated, it cannot be moved except in sports contexts, but sometimes it is not enough. We worry about video games because they instigate violence, not the repression we exercise on our young people locked up in the room ».