Geopolitical Borders and Psychic Borders: Is a Dialogue Possible? Toward a Geoclinical Practice Centered on the Subject of Migrants

Abstract

As the current burning topic of border closures demonstrates—whether they result from the Covid-19 pandemic or the construction of anti-migrant walls—in today’s world, borders are making a comeback. My experience as a researcher in France’s Calais Jungle, a migrant encampment situated close to the border with the United Kingdom—as well as the case study of a refugee patient seen in psychanalytic consultation in Paris—serves to demonstrate how the experience of borders enduringly affects the psyches and bodies of migrants. This article examines the close relationship between psychic life and geopolitical life, as well as the way in which the border experience desubjectivizes as much as it opens up the possibility of resubjectivation.

Keywords:

• Borders
• subjectivity
• migrants
• interdisciplinary
• encampment
• creativity

Notes on Contributor

Elise Pestre is a faculty member of the Département de Psychologie, Etudes Psychanalytiques, University de Paris, CRPMS (Center of Research Psychoanalysis and Medicine), France.

Notes

1 The etymology of the word experience expresses what took place on this occasion: ex (out of) and periri (peril), signifying to cross a peril or trial in which the risks are significant.

2 This neologism, coined by Deleuze and Guattari in their joint work Anti-Oedipus (2004; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1994), denotes the way in which two movements, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, are locked in a permanent dialectic, following and responding to each other while producing various changes, especially at the level of meaning and of subjectivity more generally. Reterritorialization involves something “‘of a different nature’ than what one has left behind” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 67).

3 Shortly before using this expression, Freud writes: “A person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensation, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psycho-physiology has fully discussed the manner in which a person’s own body attains its special position among other objects in the world of perception. Pain, too, seems to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our body” (1923, pp. 25-26).

4 The term jungle, circulated in the media and among the shantytown’s inhabitants, is interesting for its unapologetic evocation of colonial imagery, mixing in the exoticism of a natural environment perceived as hostile, far from the laws of civilized beings and peopled with dangerous animals. The term seems to me to indicate the perpetuation of a French and European colonial past reemerging as a repressed linguistic element.

5 In France, an example is the center for migrants set up at the Porte de la Chapelle by the Paris Mairie between 2016 and 2018. There are similar camps in other countries, such as the US camps for migrants from Central America and Mexico.

6 A clinical practice created by the Samu Social (French emergency medical personnel who function similarly to paramedics) in the 1990s, forays are usually performed by a mobile team that goes out to look for homeless people. This term is used to describe various interventions that follow along in the tradition of reaching out to others.