PSYCHOANALYTIC EXPLORATIONS ON INTERNAL EXPERIENCES OF MIGRATION

Abstract

Abstract. This paper addresses the experience and significance of migration in the internal world. The paper begins with a literary example, Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, of the visceral and somatic impact of leaving one’s actual home in the external world to go somewhere new and unfamiliar, called ‘homesickness’. This chimes with Klein’s description of a destroyed inner world where everything has turned bad ‘it was like the arrival of night if you knew you would never see daylight again’ (Toibin). It is at this point that the slow process of recovery can begin, rebuilding with anguish an inner world (Klein). I use a case example to show how in analysis that slow process of recovery can happen. The defences my patient, P., had used to shore himself up throughout his life become ever more stretched against the experience of loss of his home, 15 years earlier, until he had a serious breakdown. In his analysis P. began to mourn for all that he had lost and destroyed, his guilt about his omnipotent control and excited triumph over his father, both in his external world and in his inner world. He faced how much he had been the architect of his own downfall and the treatment became a ‘home’ where he could face his anxieties and fears as to what could be rebuilt and what couldn’t. Finally, I suggest nostalgia is a link to a good object, a home, usually expressed through primary physical sensations often linked to place, taste, smell. It is a connection from a part object world. Psychoanalysts have often seen nostalgia as an idealisation but I suggest that is maudlin nostalgia, which is rather different to a visceral connection to a remnant of a lost good object, a chronic feeling of loss and grief, a ‘commemoration of the departed’ (Britton). Nostalgia can then be seen as the thread of mental connectedness that enables personal identity to form through experiential memory of past and present events and trauma.