Psychoanalytic Aspects of Nostalgia in Emigration

Emigration challenges one’s mental structures and family dynamics, brings to life unresolved issues of separation-individualization and has significant transgenerational consequences. Exploring emigration through the lens of psychoanalysis, the work points out how changes in cultural and geographical context can have a profound emotional impact based on underlying unconscious processes. In the theoretical part of the paper, we analyze the impact of emigration on one’s psychological state and predict the outcomes of the adaptation in a new country depending on the individual's ability to grief, the quality object relationships and the strength of identity. We explore the role of nostalgia (normal and pathological) throughout an immigrant's adaptation. The practical part illustrates the concepts from the theoretical part drawing examples from four different cases. The cases demonstrate the value of an open discussion about nostalgia for clinical work (as a projective and diagnostic tool). Exploring one’s attitudes towards their immigration and nostalgia allows us to build hypotheses about a patient's fundamental functioning (the ability to grief, object relationships, building an identity, psychosexual development) and to see how these fundamentals impact the quality of adaptation in a new place. This paper contributes to the understanding of immigration: inevitably being seen as a crisis, it, however, represents an opportunity to resolve one’s earlier conflicts. The therapeutic work with immigrants allows for exploration of complex relationships between individual, familial and cultural contexts.