The Psychoanalysis of Migration

The history of psychoanalysis is itself a history of migration, starting with Sigmund Freud, who was born in the town of Příbor (in what is now the Czech Republic) but lived nearly his whole life in Vienna, from which he was forced to flee to London near the end of his life. He himself noted the difficulties he had analyzing English-speaking patients.

In the modern world, almost anyone can travel outside their home country without much trouble — for a holiday, say, or a business trip. Some people move to another country for study or work and end up staying for years. And some are forced to leave home for good, for one reason or another.

Migration begins the moment a person starts thinking about a possible move. From there, expectations of the new country start to form, and the person begins learning about a different culture, a different language, countless practical details. And yet, no matter how well prepared, every migrant will live through crisis after crisis. Whatever the reason for the move, sooner or later a person is caught up in a tangle of conflicting feelings, and each person experiences these migration-related changes in their own way. The intensity of these feelings can depend on what was left behind, and on what’s actually present, right now, in the new country. And the outward circumstances a person finds themselves in rarely tell the whole story of what’s happening inside them.

In the psychoanalysis of migration, every migrant is treated as an independent person with their own history and their own particular problems — there can be no generalizations here for an analyst. Everything, past and present, historical, social, and cultural, finds its expression in the unconscious. Over the course of therapy, it becomes possible to work through the deeper layers of what’s happening and understand exactly how migration is affecting you.

There are plenty of books on the psychology of migration in Russian, but almost everything on the psychoanalysis of migration specifically exists only in English and other languages — this piece drew on material from the book “Migration and Intercultural Psychoanalysis.”