Epilogue: The Refugee Experience

The articles in this issue do not allow us to make any sweeping generalizations about what constitutes refugee experience. Perhaps finding all-embracing descriptors for responses to the diverse circumstances that force people out of their homes is no more possible than pinpointing just what makes us human. While there are probably as many different ways of being a refugee as there are refugees, each of the articles highlights some significant aspects of the experience that are undoubtedly widely shared.

Zarnegar and Mohammadpour-Yazdi, Iranians by birth, were both forced to leave their beloved homeland. Yet they emphasize quite different aspects of the immigrant experiences. Zarnegar uses the term “phantom selfhood” to describe how her feelings of loss and grief were mitigated by a sense of continuity with her home country. Mohammadpour-Yazdi describes immigration as “a flight for equilibrium” by which he means a journey toward independent thinking and liberation. Luci and Kahn focus on the bodily experience of refugees. They contend that “pain, abuse, anger, guilt, wounds and shame” are inscribed in bodies of refugees which are often mutilated. Despite the tendency in the psychoanalytic literature to accent the refugee’s desperate flight from danger, Sperry and Mull understand the refugee journey as one of extraordinary agency marked by resistance against oppression and what they call “radical hoping.” Togashi and Brothers attend to experiences of homelessness among refugees and the “radical anxiety” associated with being disconnected from or unstably bonded to home.

Despite the diversity of the aspects of refugee experience these articles highlight, what they have in common is that all of them were written from within a psychoanalytic perspective that seeks to deeply understand the infinite varieties of human experience.

History is, to a large extent, made up of stories of humans seeking refuge. As the articles suggest, we analysts are always already refugee “player-witnesses” (Togashi, 2020). It is probable that our own family histories contain refugees stories and it is increasingly likely that our future stories will tell of refugee experiences. We hope that these articles have helped to prepare us for that tragic eventuality in our personal and professional lives.

Doris Brothers, Ph.D.

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

Issue Editors