Psychoanalytic Work with Migrants and Refugees

Bonds and Fractures Across Identities and Cultures

Virginia De Micco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040387061
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalytic Work with Migrants and Refugees presents a rich panorama of the clinical issues facing those who experience migration.

Thorough and empathetic in its approach, this book considers the potentially devastating impact of migration on one's sense of personal and cultural identity, using clinical vignettes from reception centres to illustrate the experience of both adult and adolescent migrants. Virginia De Micco looks at the transgenerational impact migration can have on psychic development and child-parent relationships, both on a socio-anthropological and an unconscious level. She highlights the unique migratory experience of both women and mothers, equipping readers with the tools to deal with the grief and guilt that can arise in these nuanced situations. Adopting an anthropological approach, De Micco also considers the irrevocable impact of migration on the host country, looking both at the reaction of those who live in the receiving countries as well as the broader impact of multiculturalism and globalisation. Throughout, the book offers a deep, fundamental understanding of the psychic conditions and reactions of people receiving migrants, with a view to avoiding cultural misunderstandings and bias and improving the integration process.

This book is an essential manual for psychoanalysts and psychologists working with migrants and refugees, as well as social workers and care workers based in reception centres and other institutions dealing with migrants.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Permissions
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Unconscious of the Others: about the Unconscious, cultural differences and anthropological transformations
• 2 The multiple faces of migratory trauma
• 3 Cultural ruptures, identity ruptures: growing up between two worlds
• 4 Migration: surviving the inhumane
• 5 Transplanting/transmitting: bonds and identifications in migrations
• 6 ‘The skin I live in, the name I bare’: cultural fractures and transgenerational bonds in migrant children
• 7 Where is my place? Families in transition
• 8 Bodies in migration: memories, trauma, belonging
• 9 The double body of the adolescent migrants
• 10 I have war on my mind: about foreign adolescences
• 11 Ideals, cultural differences, and transgenerational fractures: about foreign sexuality
• 12 What women don’t say: mute traumatic traces and bodily resistance in women’s migration
• 13 The foreign and the other: the uncanny intimacy (l’inquiétante intimité)
• 14 Psychoanalytic listening to children fleeing war: fragile borders on the threshold of horror
• 15 Illusions, and disillusions, in psychoanalytic work with migrants and refugees
• 16 In the margin
• Index