Trauma, flight and migration: Psychoanalytic perspectives

ABSTRACT

This book brings together leading international psychoanalysts to discuss what psychoanalysis can offer to people who have experienced trauma, flight, and migration. The four parts of the book cover several elements of this work, including psychoanalytic projects beyond the couch, and collaboration with the UN. Each chapter presents an example of the applications of psychoanalysis with a specific group or in a particular context, from working with refugees in China to understanding the experiences of women who have witnessed political violence in Peru. Trauma, flight, and migration have become signatures of our time. Towards the end of 2021 there were 82.4 million migrants and refugees seeking asylum from their countries of origin in countries far away from war, civil unrest, and economic turmoil. Migrants and refugees often suffer from mental health problems, having experienced crises caused by dislocation from their homes, with a loss of all that is familiar. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world in a previously unimaginable way within a very short time. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased social injustice the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged, the rich and the poor, has widened. Many of the psychoanalysts who have written chapters for this book will address the profound experience of limitation and loss in the face of pervasive structural violence in the 21st century. The book reveals the thinking and work of a small group of the many psychoanalysts who are currently working in the humanitarian field. The innovative book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists looking to learn more about working with people who have experienced the impact of traumatic movement or migration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)