Is This My Home? How Psychoanalytic Training Led to My Cultural Reawakening

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I reflect on how cultural selfobject experiences shape one’s sense of identity and how contemporary psychoanalysis has evolved in order to recognize the impact of extra psychic factors on emotional development. I use my personal experience as a Jewish, first-generation daughter of immigrants to focus on culture, fantasied whiteness, intergenerational transmission of the trauma of immigration, and the role of dissociation in formation of identity. I also elaborate on how an expanded psychoanalytic theory and practice that includes the socio-cultural as part of the relational field has helped me to understand how these experiences become internalized.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic training
• immigration
• cultural selfobject experiences
• contemporary psychoanalysis
• fantasy of whiteness
• intergenerational transmission of trauma
• Jewish
• dissociation
• home

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth B. Migler

Ruth B. Migler, M.A., MSW, is a graduate of the Psychoanalytic Training program at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP+P) in Washington, DC. She is Co-Director Emeritus of ICP+P and on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Training Program and the Contemporary Approaches to Psychotherapy Program at ICP+P. She is in private practice in Washington, DC and Rockville, MD where she sees people remotely and in person.