Prologue: The Refugee Experience

More people than ever before in history are living as refugees. Wars, political persecution, life-threatening poverty, domestic and gang-related violence as well as devastating natural and human-caused disasters have driven them from their homes and homelands. Rather than receiving shelter and protection in the places they have risked their lives to enter, many face insurmountable barriers and further psychological and physical harm.

The world of refugees is our world. But given the relative safety and comfort many of us enjoy, it may seem difficult to comprehend—or even imagine—living as a refugee. What is it like to leave behind everything that once gave life meaning and order? How much courage is required to flee toward the unknown? What is the feeling of being regarded as alien and unwelcome? How can one bear the possibility of never seeing loved ones again?

Perhaps it is only fitting that we asked psychoanalysts to help us understand the experience of being a refugee. After all, its founder was himself a refugee. Sigmund Freud was forced to leave Austria for London when the Anschluss threatened his family and his own existence. Theodor Reik, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Heinz Kohut and many other prominent analysts sought refuge in the United States.

We open this issue with an article by two Iranian émigrés, Gita Zarnegar and Ahmad-Reza Mohammadpour-Yazdi entitled, “The Long Winding Road to Liberation: The Tales of Two Iranian Immigrants.” They draw on their own personal experiences of exile from different periods in Iran’s sociopolitical history. Fom the perspective of Intersubjectivity and nonlinear dynamic systems theories, Zarnegar, who emigrated to the U.S. before the Islamic Revolution, explains how psychoanalysis provided a means of adaptation and acculturation. She provides brief historical sketches of Iran and Iranian Jews and describes the limitations of psychoanalysis in Iran.

Mohammadpour-Yazdi, who emigrated to Austria following the Islamic Revolution, uses Contemporary Freudian theory. He describes his own emigration as “a flight for equilibrium” and provides compelling examples of his work with Iranian refugees.

In the next article, “Analytic Therapy with Refugees: Between Silence and Embodied Narratives,” Monica Luci and Margarita Kahn provide an overview of their therapeutic work with asylum seekers and refugees in Italy. The first part of their article presents a general account of the experiences of refugees during the last five years during which Italy was rocked by political turbulence and the COVID-19 crisis. The second part examines therapeutic work with refugees, many of whom experienced excruciating hardships as they made their way toward what they hoped would be a safer haven.

Luci and Kahn describe how “body to body” communication enables patients to establish contact with their therapists and to “re-narrate” traumatic experiences. They attempt to show how the interconnection of bodily experiencing, intra-psychic, interpersonal and large-group dynamics in political and social contexts affects psychotherapy.

Margy Sperry and Susan Mull employ “the counter story telling method” used by critical race theorists in their riveting article, “Lives on the Line: Border Stories,” to pose a challenge to the dominant socio-political narratives that emphasize the despair and desperation of refugees. Both authors conducted psychosocial evaluations of people seeking asylum in the United States in a nonprofit Law Office in El Paso, Texas. There they interviewed Ketsia, who fled persecution in Cameroon in West Africa, and Elena, who was born in Juarez, Mexico, and sought asylum on the grounds of life-threatening domestic violence.

While the stories of both women are harrowing, they also vividly illustrate what Sperry and Mull view as active resistance and what they term, “radical hoping” which, they contend, serves as a bridge between “hopeless resignation” and the “longing for a safer, more dignified future.”

The concluding article by Koichi Togashi and Doris Brothers entitled, “Are We All Refugees?” examines refugee experience as a loss of home. The authors present an understanding of home as more than simply a place. It is, for them, the way in which humans locate themselves among other humans. Following their review of some of the psychoanalytic literature on the refugee experience, they report on a study they conducted with refugees of the Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor explosion. They find support for their thesis about traumatic homelessness in Martin Buber’s philosophical understanding of home. A therapeutic relationship with a woman forced to leave Egypt as a young child is then described in terms of one the author’s realizations about her own experience of homelessness. The article concludes with a discussion of the possible intergenerational transmission of traumatic homelessness stemming from the exile of early humans when they left Africa.

Doris Brothers, Ph.D.

Koichi Togashi, Ph.D., L.P.

Issue Editors