In this article the author studies exile and uprooting in Virgil’s Aeneid. The article places emphasis on the mandate given to Aeneas by his parents Anchises and the goddess Venus, as he flees from the burning city of Troy in the company of the surviving Trojans with de aim of finding a land for his people, a home that found in Lazio, Italy. From these Trojans, much later, Romulus, the founder of Rome, would be born. The poem of the Aeneid recounts the adventures of this uprooted people, traveling across the Mediterranean, as well as the uncertainties of Aeneas, his nostalgias, his temptations, his desires for renunciation, for revenge, the impact of his descent to the Underworld as well as the costly wars of conquest and, ultimately, its settlement. The intimacy of the more or less painful psychological processes of the uprooted is underlined, in particular the three moments of re-rooting (grouping, isolation, false adaptation and recourse to the ancestors for integration in the host country).
Passages from the work are cited to shed light on these processes and highlight the beauty of the text. The text is recommended for group professionals because the processes examined present profound analogies with group learning, clinical processes and some fundamental existential experiences.