Migration Trauma, Culture, and Finding the Psychological Home Within by Conroy Grace P.;

Author:Conroy, Grace P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated

Chapter 4

Concluding Analysis of Composite Cases

In each presented composite case study, migration created a crisis in the patient/subject’s life and identity. Each composite case illustrates different developmental issues and different generations (1st, 2nd and 1½) of migrants. By analyzing each case study’s problems and difficulties one can better infer what are the healthier solutions to the process of migration and who makes a successful migration to a new world.

One may deduce that a more successful migrant does not carry the type of emotional and psychological baggage that is presented in these composite migration stories. So a healthier migrant is not necessarily making a major escape from his internal issues via migration and, if to some degree he does, then he would have to work through them in a new culture, because these issues will not go away in the new environment.

In any case, the migration process represents a form of crisis and the identity will get destabilized. They are some migrants that may have the capacity to recover from such a crisis and identity destabilization rather quickly. But when someone is making a “major escape” from their internal issues via migrations, the impact of the migration will create more internal and external problems.

What literature and the above case studies suggest is that if one is moving a physical and psychological home from one culture to another, one inevitably will have to readjust both internally and externally to a new place and physical home. One will have to work through different types of anxieties, losses, and changes. In a successful migration the identity of the migrant is preserved and enhanced by the migration process.

In situations where a migrant’s identity is already problematic the migration will become an additional trauma, intertwined with pre-existing problems.

ELA’S COMPOSITE CASE

Ela’s composite migration story represents a so-called one-and-a-half generation migrant. She migrated to America with her parents when she was in her adolescence. She had real knowledge of what it is like to be born and live in Eastern Europe. Ela had deep roots to her home country and her Eastern European identity was already evident. She was comfortable in her home country and her migration was involuntary and felt like an exile from her native home.

Ela’s early separation-individuation process from her mother was already severely problematic in her home country. The process of migration made Ela’s separation-individuation process even more problematic, and she got caught up into all sorts of manic escapes from her internal mother via identity reinventions, etc. Because this fundamental separation issue was not worked through in her home country before migration, her manic defenses after the migration became even more extreme.

In fact, after the migration to America, the whole family became more closed off and suspicious about the external world. The parents had their own unworked-through traumas before the migration, and after migration her father’s drinking problem increased, the mother became more anxious, and the whole family became more enmeshed.

The premigration family issues worsened and the parents and children were forced to fall back upon each other.

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