Julia Beltsiou, ed. Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves. Relational Perspectives Book Series. New York: Routledge, 2016. 244 pp. $49.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-74182-8.
Reviewed by Ana Inés Heras (Instituto para la Inclusión Social y el Desarrollo Humano-LICH-CONICET-Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
Published on H-Borderlands (June, 2021)
Commissioned by María de los Ángeles Picone (Boston College)
In reviewing this book, I will address two questions that bear a relation to one another. What are the specifics of the semantic relationship proposed in the title, that is, immigration in psychoanalysis? Why is this book of interest to scholars working on issues of borderlands?
Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves is organized in eight parts, presenting different yet intertwined issues, such as immigration as psychological opportunity; self-experience and immigration; otherness; native and foreign languages as related to psychoanalysis, identity, trauma, melancholia, and mourning; and the immigrant in older age. Each contributing author addresses the diversity of topics in a specific manner, in terms of the disciplines they rest on—besides psychoanalytic theory—and of their own background. They have experienced a journey across geographies, countries, immigrant status, and psychoanalytic perspective. In addition to editor Julia Beltsiou, the authors are Francisco González, Hazel Ipp, Ghislaine Boulanger, Glenys Lobban, Dino Koutsolioutsos, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Irene Cairo, Pratyusha Tummala-Narra, Dori Laub, Lama Zuhair Khouri, and Eva Hoffman, and they come from such countries as Cuba, South Africa, Greece, India, Austria, Germany, and Canada. The geographies they traverse in their chapters include Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Their work thus bridges several of these geographies and connects with North America, where most of them develop or have developed their work and practice. One of the main contributions of this book to H-Borderlands subscribers is that it informs or reminds us of several different historical, cultural, and social situations across the world when people migrate or are forced to migrate.
Each chapter contextualizes historical issues and geopolitical themes. Borders, in this book, are taken to mean not only the geopolitical frontier but also the different multifaceted liminal spaces in between language(s), gendered selves, bi-nationality, education, and disciplines—and perspectives within disciplines. This plural notion of “border” is discussed in several chapters, for example, by Bernstein (“Living between languages”) and Koutsolioutsos (“Migration in Search of Sexual Identity”).
Each chapter can be read under the light of how the singular experience may help readers understand immigration displacement and border trespassing as general themes. The essays remind us of the importance of understanding the singular, that is, the specifics (of an individual, of an immigrant group, of a collectivity or culture) of broader processes in time. A poignant example is the piece by Ipp (“Nell—A Bridge to the Amputated Self”), in which she analyzes the similarities and differences across South African people in terms of ethnic and cultural origins, language, political rights, and skin color. In her analysis of working with someone who came from her land but was different than her (or so she perceived at the beginning), she shows that difference does make a difference, and yet, paradoxically, she also shows how perceiving and working with difference may bridge over seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.
Several of the chapters present struggles linked to topics related to people´s displacement, such as colonial domination, diglossia, civil and human rights, and racism. The authors present contextualized data to comprehend both the extreme challenges and the unexpected potential that the processes of dislocation through immigration bring. Among the challenges are the ones related to discrimination (by accent, skin color, gender, and sexual orientation), loss of identity, fear of total assimilation, and anguish of never finding a home. The challenging issues also provide different sociological and political categories that are used to classify and understand the immigrant experience. That is, immigration may act as a general holder for experiences as different as being exiled, seeking refuge, escaping and living in disguise, being forced to immigrate (for example, because you are a child and your family moves), or voluntarily immigrating. Yet each of these situations is indeed different, and people who experience them are situated very differently. Some of these issues are addressed in several chapters, such as, for example, the one authored by Boulanger (“Seeing Double, Being Double”), the one by Beltsiou (“Seeking Home in the Foreign”), and the chapter by Tummala-Narra (“Names, Name Changes, and Identity in the Context of Migration”).
On the other hand, several of the clinical cases portrayed in the book and the theorization that springs from their analyses also highlight the potential power of transformation that the experience of immigration may bring, such as becoming a multilingual and multicultural subject, understanding difference in ways others may not (both theoretically and from direct experience), and equipping oneself with tools otherwise not available, had the change of place not occurred. The book presents these topics for consideration throughout the analysis of clinical cases and the related analysis of the psychoanalyst experience and conceptual work. One such example is the chapter by González, which addresses displacement as a “fertile ground for creativity, the strange place where something new can come into being” (p. 15). González’s perspective is that this creativity and becoming of the new needs to be interpreted as a possibility not only for the foreign, immigrant patient but also for psychoanalysis, in as much as it is part of the foundations of the discipline, already present in Sigmund Freud’s work, and a part of the conceptualization of the experience of being human, which psychoanalysis addresses when framing the clinical experience as one where subjects reconstruct their ongoing displacements.
At first glance, this book presents the issue of uniqueness and forces us to consider whether there can be common themes regarding psychoanalysis and immigration. In this respect, some authors conclude that immigration is irremediably connected to melancholia and the traumatic, while others highlight the potentialities, openness, and creative forces underpinning any situation of (dis)location. Several authors also take a stance toward the importance of not thinking in binary terms (for example, being/not being native or a foreigner; speaking/not speaking a language; new/old traditions and cultural ways; melancholia and happiness), and in different manners, they speak to this issue by providing examples of continuity, dialectics, and transformation. This framework (related to hybridity, or third space, in terms of Homi K. Bhabha´s work, quoted throughout the book in more than one chapter) also helps conceptualize two other issues, interesting for those working within the discipline of history and concerned with borderlands: location and time. Location, already introduced in the paragraphs above, points to understanding physical space, geographies, traveling, moving across the globe and the frontiers, arriving, settling, and unsettling, but in terms of place. According to Beltsiou, “place is a category largely neglected by psychoanalysis, which opts for the much less saturated, less physical, more mathematically abstract and universalized idea of space. Immigration brings into sharp relief what usually remains invisible: place matters” (p. 25). In this respect, there may be clear connections with historians who work with the material aspects of human life to understand the issues they study. The concreteness of life as it is lived, and as people in their clinical encounters recount it, matters and becomes the material data from where to sustain a co-investigation with their analysts when working in therapy. The chapter by Khouri (“The Immigrant’s Neverland”) is one such example.
Precisely this issue of the concrete, the materiality of lived experience, or what González terms “the sensuous texture of locality,” may be one of the reasons why the conjunction “and” is not used in the title; instead, the preposition in links the two fields with a semantic relationship of inclusion: immigration in psychoanalysis (p. 27). Throughout the book, then, a central idea is developed, already located in the title: immigration is a phenomenon under study in psychoanalysis as it relates to clinical work (that is, in each singular human being and as each human being belongs to a community in movement), but it is also a cue to understanding psychoanalysts who are immigrants. Therefore, one may answer the question about the commonalities across the uniqueness presented throughout the book by stating that there are, at least, two common themes: understanding the immigrant experience by the discipline (psychoanalysis) and by its practitioners (psychoanalysts) in their clinical work and in informing public policy, and comprehending that the immigrant analyst is also constantly locating her/himself in order to develop clinical and theoretical advancements. It is in this respect that the subtitle can also be understood: locating ourselves. The book, in the introduction, and then, chapter by chapter, unravels this locative aspect, which is played out, as stated above, in terms of geography, historical context, and the different ways cultures and languages are situated in respect to one another.
It is also important to note that the book was published in the Relational Perspectives Book series, born in 1990 and coordinated at that point by S. A. Mitchell and more recently by Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris. To date, the series has published 111 volumes. The book, chapter by chapter, reinforces the notion that singularity and uniqueness may be worth exploring in their intersection with a specific area within psychoanalysis, that of relational perspective. At the beginning of the book, Beltsiou offers an explanation about the realization she came across during the American Psychological Association Conference in April 2013: that there was growing interest in the topic of psychoanalysis and immigration. She notes that at the conference there were four panels focusing on the topic of immigration and clinical work. These sessions were well attended, and, specifically, on the panel that took on the subtitle of the book, there was an explicit interest in developing publications on the subject. Taking these facts as an indication that, indeed, there “is a thirst for understanding the immigrant subjectivity,” Beltsiou set herself the task to coordinate the writing of the book I am now reviewing (p. 3).
Several of the authors have migrated more than once and thus have changed their geography, language, and work at different stages of their professional paths. This type of experience is explored, and theorized, by Laub (“On Leaving Home and the Flight from Trauma”) and Bernstein (“Living between Languages”). Since the relational perspective in psychoanalysis acknowledges that the personal experience of the analyst can contribute to clinical work, Laub and Bernstein reflect how specifically the immigration experience can or may contribute to the profession of becoming and being a psychoanalyst, and of understanding human beings from different backgrounds. And interestingly too, and building on the notion of migrating more than once, these and other chapters also acknowledge that human experience may be considered as a constant traveling, taking then the concrete situation of immigration as a metaphor for life, and for professional life/development/career building in particular (for example, Lobban’s chapter, “The Immigrant Analyst,” or Hoffman’s chapter, “Out of Exile”).
A final note, and related to the topic addressed at the beginning of this review: the authors contributing to this book bridge several different perspectives and disciplines with psychoanalysis. We can say, metaphorically, that they continuously cross borders. Read in this key, the book is a useful resource to think through several disciplines, their contributions, their limitations, and their border and borderless relations. For example, even though she does not explicitly resort to linguistic or sociolinguistic theory in her chapter (“The Place across the Street”), Cairo’s conceptual understanding is grounded in these disciplines, in my reading of her work. Evidence of this is that to present the cases by which she chooses to discuss the conceptual categories coming out of psychoanalysis and social psychology, such as “interpretation,” “association,” or “connection,” she needs to rest on such concepts as “imagery,” “pronouns,” “prosody,” “lexicon,” and so forth. The borders of the discipline, thus, seem much more permeable than one would imagine, and the contributions to other disciplines can be cartographed through several of the chapters in this book.
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Citation:
Ana Inés Heras. Review of Beltsiou, Julia, ed., Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves.
H-Borderlands, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55286
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