Sordocecità e comunicazione. Racconto di un'esperienza alla Lega del Filo d'Oro

Abstract

Communication is all along considered as the fabric of life of each individual and it is rigthly perceived as a main need. Everybody has the need of exchanging informations and getting in touch with others, beyond their physical, psychological or social conditions. The following paper starts from these considerations and involves the specific case of deafblind population, apparently constrained in dark and in silence. Traditionally, we tend to relate the concept of communication to the concept of speaking, but in this paper we shall prove that it is possible to communicate through touch without the support of sight and voice. There are a lot of systems to get in touch with a deafblind person, but it is necessary to know them, to comprehend them and, mainly, to be able to use and adapt them to the person you are interacting with. He or She has his/her own background which we must absolutely consider. Starting from the concept of communication, the following paper outlines deafblindness condition, the systems of communication used by deafblind persons and shows the real case of a deafblind individual, F., who is a guest of the association Lega del Filo d’Oro. In this paper of F. is taken into consideration and shown his precious uniqueness: his history allows him to learn several systems of communication such as Block, Malossi system, Tadoma, Sign Language and Tactile Sign Language. F. has the possibility to choose which system to use in every moment and with any person who interacts with him: Malossi system with the health or social worker who doesn’t know Sign Language, Tadoma with his blind friend to discriminate what she says, or Tactile Sign Language with people able to use it. The study of F. questions the fact that not only the interlocutor has to adapt to deafblind person's system of communication but also the deafblind person can adapt himself to his interlocutor as well. Everybody makes his own communicative choices, even who can not see and hear.