Life Planning and Territory Representation in Students of Central-Eastern Sicily

A young person’s capacity for existential planning and the construction of a path of personal and professional growth reflect the representation of Self in the future, in terms of “Possible Selves”, or rather, what individuals think they can become, would like to become and fear becoming. Life planning, as a function of the interaction between the subjective world and physical-social factors of the context of belonging, refers to the dynamic relationship between the individual and the environment, involving the processes of identity construction and correlating to the representation of the present and future Self . The data of our research show that the young people in our sample have a capacity for life planning that, in terms of expectations and aspirations, is collocated far from the context of their lives; the data also shows that their representation of the territory is characterized by ambivalence, which is negative on a level of everyday operating and positive in affective terms. The representation of one’s own territory and planning investment in it appears to be correlated with the dimensions of the Self.