Immigration, Belonging, and the Tension Between Center and Margin in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Immigration is in the unconscious of the unconscious of psychoanalysis. Immigration as a dramatic instance of the always precarious social and political registers of human living. Immigration as the movement of people from one place to another, across regions and national borders and oceans, by choice or necessity. Immigration as movement across other types of social boundaries, always defining an outside and a way into a desired inside. Immigration as an inverted reflection of our deep need to belong. This paper reflects on immigration as a clinical reality and as a clinical metaphor. It uses the notion of immigration to question the perceived, often if not always illusory settledness of the analytic practice, and its tendency to privilege a sense of well-inhabited center vis-à-vis the margins we all travel through and persist in. My aim is to join Veronica Csillag in deliberating a more uncertain and daring potential for our theory making and practice.

Notes

¹ The emerging field of transgenerational trauma is such prominent exception. For a sample of important contributions, see Davoine and Gaudillier (2004); Salberg and Grand (2016a & b); Harris, Kalb, and Klebanoff (2016a & b); and Beltsiou (2015).

² As famously argued by Fukuyama in his 1989 article of that same title.

³ See Gioirgio Agamben’s (2005) book of the same title for a review of the notion of “state of exception” and its place in the nought of both Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, the Nazis’ political-legal theorist.

⁴ That is, the same way an event in a child’s life might seem in the first instance sexually neutral, but at a later date be remembered and resignified as sexual, social meaning could also be introduced afterward into an experience that originally had registered none. For example, when my parents took me at age 3 to see the famous mount Masada, what I had registered was a dry yellow mountain that we all climbed. But later in life, as I understood the symbolic significance of that mountain in our collective mythology, my parents’ gesture took on a completely new meaning for me. And that mountain was never the same.

⁵ As some critics of psychoanalysis would argue—paralleling and colluding with prevalent ideologies of individual agency and responsibility while obscuring the power structures that make use of them to exploit our resources.

⁶ This declaration appears in the German edition of Ferenczi’s “Bausteine zur Psychoanalyse.” But of interest, it was not included in the Ernest Jones English translation of Ferenczi’s work. I became acquainted with it through reading Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and I am therefore referencing the translation into English included in Adorno’s book.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eyal Rozmarin

Eyal Rozmarin, Ph.D., is Co-Editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Associate Editor of the book series Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, and a member of the scientific committee of the Freud Foundation in Vienna. His research takes place in intersection of psychoanalysis and social theory, and explores the relations between subjectivity, collective forces and history. He is in private practice in New York.