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Psychoanalytic Work with Migrants and Refugees presents a rich panorama of the clinical issues facing those who experience migration.
Thorough and empathetic in its approach, this book considers the potentially devastating impact of migration on one's sense of personal and cultural identity, using clinical vignettes from reception centres to illustrate the experience of both adult and adolescent migrants. Virginia De Micco looks at the transgenerational impact migration can have on psychic development and child-parent relationships, both on a socio-anthropological and an unconscious level. She highlights the unique migratory experience of both women and mothers, equipping readers with the tools to deal with the grief and guilt that can arise in these nuanced situations. Adopting an anthropological approach, De Micco also considers the irrevocable impact of migration on the host country, looking both at the reaction of those who live in the receiving countries as well as the broader impact of multiculturalism and globalisation. Throughout, the book offers a deep, fundamental understanding of the psychic conditions and reactions of people receiving migrants, with a view to avoiding cultural misunderstandings and bias and improving the integration process.
This book is an essential manual for psychoanalysts and psychologists working with migrants and refugees, as well as social workers and care workers based in reception centres and other institutions dealing with migrants.
List of contents
1. The Unconscious of the Others 2. The multiple faces of migratory traumas 3. Cultural ruptures, identity ruptures. Growing up between two worlds 4. Migration : surviving the inhumane 5. Transplanting/Transmitting. Bonds and Identifications in migrations 6. The skin I live in, the name I bare. Cultural fractures and transgenerational bonds in migrant children 7. Where is my place ? Families in transition 8. Bodies in migration : memories, traumas, belongings 9. The double body of the adolescent migrants 10. I have war on my mind. About foreign adolescences 11. Ideals, cultural differences and transgenerational fractures : about foreign sexuality 12. What women don't say...Mute traumatic traces and bodily resistance in women's migration 13. The foreign and the other : the uncanny intimacy (l'inquiétante intimité) 14. Psychoanalytical listening to children fleeing war. Fragile borders on the thresholds of horror 15. Illusions, and disillusions, in psychoanalytical work with migrants and refugees 16. In the margin
About the author
Virginia De Micco is a psychiatrist and anthropologist based in Italy. She is a full member of the
Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI) and is a member of the
IPA Research Group for Geographies of Psychoanalysis, the IPA Committee on Humanitarian Psychoanalysis, and the EPF Group on 'Psychoanalysis Migration and Cultural Identities'. She is chair of the PER group (Psicoanalisti Europei per i Rifugiati) of the Italian Society. She works in the psychocultural field, particularly with migrants and refugees, with special attention to cultural differences, the psychodynamics of racism and prejudice, the anthropological transformations and their consequences on subjectivation processes, mother-child relations and the transgenerational aspects of traumas in migratory experience.
