Dear Colleagues, 

We are excited to feature this paper by Dr. Ruth Lijtmaer, which conveys the perilous plight of immigrants entering the United States. She connects the experience of immigrants with the conception of America as a real body politic--compelled to define boundaries by constructing walls--to expel human beings conceived as alien or foreign or not-self. The nation functions as if a body with an immune system.

Best,

Mary Helen Guider-Shaw

Destruction and Survival in a Dangerous Journey

I focus my paper on the experiences in which we are all living today, from the Cova-19 virus to police brutality. 

One way to understand the virus is to think of biology and the immune system. The function of the immune system is the watchful protector of the environment of the body. Anything foreign that invades this environment must be rapidly detected and removed.

Nations, like bodies, possess sharply defined boundaries, and frequently are imagined to be threatened. When a nation feels its boundaries are fragile, it may seek to create "walls" to prevent alien cells from entering the body politic. Immigrants are conceived as invaders, creeping through porous boundaries, threatening to destroy a vulnerable self (Koenigsberg, 2016, 2020).

A wall must be erected to protect the vulnerable citizens: to defend against sexual assault, crimes, and to eliminate the danger of parasitic entities draining the nation's resources. The experience of one’s nations with insecure or porous boundaries, is equivalent to the fear that one’s own body will be penetrated. Therefore, it’s necessary to “build a wall” to protect the self from the alien "Other" that threatens to break into one’s body. The walls and boundaries that nations created did not stop the virus.

Abruptly, without warning the corona virus appeared. It has no concept of national boundaries or walls. It creeps into every space, seeks real bodies to penetrate, real cells to devour. Studies show that African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to die of the virus because they sustain the pre-existing condition known as race (Jackson, 2020).

This leads to police brutality and the power inequality and discrimination that immigrants and refugees endure. White privilege may beboth a legacy and a cause of racism and discrimination (Collins 2018), both unconsciously enjoyed and consciously perpetuated.

It is both on the surface, and also deeply embedded within American life. It is an unconscious prejudice perpetuated by the lack of awareness among white people that they held this power. It could be found in day-to-day transactions and in white people’s ability to move through the professional and personal worlds with relative ease. While the pandemic is serious and real, another pandemic is racism: "I cannot breathe."

The fear of immigrants reflects anxiety in multiple dimensions, involving not only fears by the host country, but also the xenophobia that immigrants carry with them from their countries of origin. It reflects the inevitable loss and disappointment, traumatic stress, and shifts in identity produced in an immigrant’s adjustment to living in the new, adoptive country (Tummala-Narra, 2019).

As a result of all we are  experiencing today, there is a reactivation of prior traumas in the context of current threats. It opens up the past that at times was repressed, times we believed we had worked through. Now these traumas are present again.

Let me go to the topic of this presentation, "Destruction and survival in a dangerous journey." I made the connection between the virus and police brutality because in each case immigrants, refugees and are treated with disdain, they are dehumanized and cast off from society.

It will be helpful to distinguish between immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Immigrants leave by choice, refugees have successfully pursued their claim for asylum, and asylum seekers have no alternative but to leave their country immediately without preparation (Lijtmaer, 2016).

Immigration, exile and refugee states activate psychological processes including a sense of unreality, reliance on fantasies to make meaning, difficulty integrating and holding self-states belonging to different cultures. (Dieter Miller 2016). In all cases, a mourning process is involved. Mourning for the lost country, family, friends, familiar environment, rituals and language (Volkan, 2017). It is multilayered and varies in part as a function of what propels the geographic relocation.

For the immigrants, the decision to migrate can be based on many circumstances: if migration is temporary or permanent; time available to prepare, the possibility of visiting the home country, age of migration (Akhtar, 1999), and the way the host country receives the new immigrant. All these contribute how the individual adjusts to the new environment (Lijtmaer, 2011).

The experience of immigration is filled with dreams and nightmares, especially in today’s climate of hostility towards foreigners, and for immigrants of color and/or limited resources. Even those who are documented and privileged undergo significant separations and internal fragmentations as their dreams of living in America become reality. The loss of identity and  conflict created in separating from loved ones left behind, creates anxiety and confusion--as the grounding effect of knowing oneself may be lost--as  return to the homeland ceases to promise repair.

The exile and refugee's migration, unlike the immigrant's, is precipitated by traumatic event, rrequently of asociopolitical nature like war and political instability.

As an exile or refugee, the person will be unable to revisit the country of origin. What was lost will remain lost. Leon and Rebeca Grinberg (1989) write about exile as a specific kind of migration in which “departure is imposed and return impossible.” They note that exiles, unlike other immigrants, are typically denied the “protective rite of farewell” (p. 157). They may also develop “survivor guilt”--since they escaped, and others could not.

Refugees leave in a rush to save their lives and those of their families. They would not be able to be alive if they had stayed because of political and religious persecution, death threats, slavery, rape of women, or forced labor. They do not have time to mourn the losses; there is no time for pleasantries or “ideal migration.” These refugees pay smugglers or "coyotes" to take them to safety, but frequently there is no safe place to go. They suffer rejection at all levels of experience, particularly because often they do not receive compassionate treatment.

They endure dehumanization and shame in addition to feelings of helplessness, loss of dignity, frustration and anger--since no one wants them. The initial hope to escape to a safe "heaven" or "the dream"--to arrive in a safe country--is transformed into a "nightmare" of humiliation and fear. The trip originally done by boat to reach Europe, "the safe heaven," may become too dangerous to survive--due to rough sea, and being in an overcrowded and poorly constructed boats. Many drowned and died in this journey to freedom. Still, the refugees continue to make this dangerous trip. If they survive the trip, some are sent back or deported.

If they are able to stay, they often reside in refugee camps where conditions are described as prison-like settings. The tents are inappropriate and  hygiene abysmal, leading to illness. The refugees live in a state of suspended animation. Disease spreads. They are desperate and exhausted. Different governments, including our own, build fences and walls to stop refugees (Lijtmaer, 2016).

Therefore, refugees “stop being specific persons and become pure victims in general: universal man, universal woman, universal child.” This process has the effect of creating Others who are conceptualized as mute and a-historical, and hence without agency. In practice then, refugees do not need to be consulted, their voices do not need to be heard, because the international script for refugee intervention is predetermined, and enabling refugees “to establish narrative authority over [their] own circumstances” could only lead to trouble (Malkki, 2006, p. 393, in O'Laughlin, 2016).

The refugee, therefore, is a bureaucratic formulation designed to exclude, and to permit actions on the body of the refugee that would never be permitted on persons with full human rights. The refugee is thus pictured as the other, the alien, the non-citizen who has lost a vital connection in terms of representation, protection, and sense of belonging to his/her community of origin (Puggioni, 2006, in O'Laughlin, 2016).

This sudden mass migration of refugees to Europe and USA is experienced as if an invasion (like the virus). While the fear of the "other," "the stranger," might be dismissed as racist or xenophobic, many people feel threatened by the influx of foreigners who may take their jobs or be dangerous terrorists (Lijtmaer, 2017). When we see the news and picture how these people are living, it's devastating.

Few of us fail to be moved by the photos of children trapped and/or fleeing war-torn and violence-ridden areas. We are devastated at the sight of youngsters escaping bombs, small children confined behind barbed wire or fences, and the bodies of asylum-seeking children washed ashore on the beaches of countries in various locations worldwide (Warshaw, 2019).

As psychoanalysts we are acutely aware of the lifelong ramifications of early and enduring trauma, the potential for intergenerational transmission of the traumas sustained, and the complexity of the bio-psycho-social needs of this highly vulnerable population.