Routledge Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves presents a unique approach to understanding the varied and multi-layered experience of immigration, exploring how social, cultural, political, and historical contexts shape the psychological experience of immigration, and with it the encounter between foreign-born patients and their psychotherapists.Beltsiou brings together a diverse group of contributors, including Ghislaine Boulanger, Eva Hoffman and Dori Laub, to discuss their own identity as immigrants and how it informs their work. They explore the complexity and the contradictions of the immigration process - the tension between loss and hope, future and past, the idealization and denigration of the other/stranger, and what it takes to tolerate the existential dialectic between separateness and belonging.Through personal accounts full of wisdom and nuance, the stories of immigration come to life and become accessible to the reader. Intended for clinicians, students, and academics interested in contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives on the topic of immigration, this book serves as a resource for clinical practice and can be read in courses on psychoanalysis, cultural psychology, immigrant studies, race and ethnic relations, self and identity, culture and human development, and immigrants and mental health. Review "Julia Beltsiou has successfully assembled talented psychoanalytic writers and scholar-practitioners with immigrant origins to create a substantive corpus of scholarship on immigration. In their work with immigrant patients we see humans striving to transmit language, thought and meanings about their histories as they mediate residual themes of hitherto unmetabolized personal and family stories. We hear gems of concealed and unconcealed narratives forging their way up. In the schism between remembering and oblivion, psychoanalysts and their immigrant patients negotiate and reconfigure their divided emigrant and immigrant selves to acquire new and felicitous destinies. A must read!"-Maurice Apprey, University of Virginia."This remarkable book, written by psychoanalysts who are immigrants themselves and fostered by analysands with the same background, is not only a collection of touching life stories, but also a document of fateful aspects of psychoanalytic history and a profound reflection on general conditions of subjectivity. In this sense immigration turns out to be not only the destiny of certain individuals or groups. It implies also, that we are all foreign to ourselves and that each desire is a longing for belonging..."-August Ruhs, M.D., former President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association and former 2011 Deputy Head of the Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy , Medical University of Vienna. About the Author Julia Beltsiou is a psychologist in private practice in New York City, where she works with a diverse group of patients, and supervises clinicians. She is an advanced candidate at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and lectures nationally and internationally on the topic of the psychological experience of immigration.