Tools in Network: an E-Net Approach to Sharing Mediation Competences.

Mediation and conflict: mirror aspects in human experience

The ubiquity of conflict and of the need to encourage social cohesion account for the offer and success of mediation practices in a large number of contexts. The omnipresence of conflict is easily shown by the fact that confrontation of different and conflicting needs is also a growth and change factor in every community. Apart from international disputes, mediation strategies can be applied as regulating instruments in private and smaller contexts: family, school, health, business, neighbour disputes, professional and company litigations, in penal justice, in bioethics, to ecological and environmental issues and interethnic relations.

However, it is not absolutely "necessary" to identify a connection between mediation and conflict. As we said, besides acting on ongoing conflicts, the culture of mediation also helps strengthen social bonds, prevent conflict from arising, i.e. stop the explosion of latent conflicts. The connection between mediation and conflict is therefore to be seen as a sort of "mirror" phenomenon which is easily observed in social contexts: the existence of conflict creates the necessity for mediation and the existence of mediation is a sign of the need to manage conflicts. In this light, "conflict and mediation" appear as two critical aspects of human relations. Any social bond and any field of human interaction (family, school, professional life) are also instruments of individual relations: i.e. contexts for mediation. And each of these "instruments" can produce tension or run through difficult times or come to a halt. The explicit resort to mediation, thanks to its implicit and essential connection to the fundamental structure of human relationships, is well suited to restore, or strengthen, damaged social instruments.

A rapid look into the field of psychological sciences shows that mediation is one of the earliest and most important experiences of the human mind. Psychical development is in fact determined also by the need to mediate between a desiring tension towards the other and the need to defend oneself from the frustration that such a desire inevitably implies. Likewise, each individual builds its psychical apparatus also according to the possibility to mediate between polymorphous and polydirectional desires at the basis of the dynamic tension between conscious and unconscious which supports mental activities. Life therefore implies a constant mediation both towards the other and towards oneself.

These very brief psychological observations throw a new light upon the reasons why mediation is so ubiquitous. It is easy to guess that all contexts can be open to mediation, as all forms of contract or social bond originate both from the relational tension common to all human beings and from the likewise inborn drive to mediate with oneself to stay connected with others. Secondly, all contexts can be open to mediation as all mediation experiences also have a sort of "intrapsychic", i.e. constitutive, origin and therefore belong to the universal psychical endowment of the human species as a whole. We note, in fact, that the term mediation used in connection with relations both between individuals and between each individual's inner psychical aspects is correct insofar as it is referred to the "triadic "structure of such relations. This passage is clearer if we concentrate our attention on a fundamental aspect of human relations: the unconscious. According to the definition of unconscious proposed by the psychoanalyst Sandro Gindro, the "unconscious" dimension of a relationship, i.e. of psychic life, does not wholly belong to the individual, but it originates and develops within a relational context; this means that its place is, always and also, "between" I and You, it becomes therefore a "third" or rather a "triadic" element. This aspect accounts for the real and effective potential of mediation strategies, i.e the actual "room" for mediation which is ensured by the fact that individuals and human groups are connected by a common "unconscious" structure (for a more detailed analysis of this idea of unconscious see the short contribution by Gindro: Le ali d'oro di Eros, published in 1994 in "Studi cattolici", n° 401-2, pp. 464-8).