Amando un boss: la psicologia mafiosa attraverso la voce di un “amante in Cosa Nostra”

Abstract

Loving a boss: psychology of mafia through the voice of a lover in Cosa Nostra

 The present work is a contribution to research aimed at understanding some features of female "mafia psychism" (Lo Verso, 1998), considered a specific and important anthropological and cultural insight into Sicily. The study, framed as clinical-qualitative, will attempt to add additional cognitive data to the mafia world, through the voice of a female stranger to Cosa Nostra but lover of a mafia boss from Agrigento. The methodology used was the semi-structured interview created ad hoc aiming at knowing certain aspects of the subject’s past and present life and drawing knowledge and/or a change in his psychological reality in the context he lives in. The data obtained from the interview were subsequently subjected to a qualitative analysis following the model of Grounded Theory and with the help of the software Atlas-ti. The purpose of this work is to extrapolate the psychodynamic aspects of the examined phenomenon, in an attempt to understand the psyche starting from the attention put to unconscious relations of human psychological life. The observation viewpoint is "group-analytical and subjectual" (Lo Verso, 1989, 1994, Lo Verso, Di Blasi 2011), which sees the subjective identity merge on the axis of the relationship between individual and collective universe.