The meaning of place and psycho-cultural border zones: reflections on migration, trauma, shame, legitimacy and identity.
An immigrant is defined as someone who has moved or been moved from one familiar place to an unfamiliar place, but to be an immigrant, rather than to simply intellectually know it, “one must inhabit mental and emotional states that are not easy to endure….The nature of [this] pain…permits no easy definition. Although linked to feelings of loss, it is not what could be called depression, nor is it, strictly speaking, anxiety, though it does include some elements of anguish.
People usually experience it as something nearly physical….as if it lies on the border between the physical and the mental”. This is a good description of the particular experience of the mental pain of being displaced; it is a state which occasions extreme anxiety, alienation and dissociation, because something previously taken for granted can feel traumatically ruptured or even catastrophically lost. This state, which can be difficult to recognise and articulate, is camouflaged by intense shame.
In this presentation Amanda introduces audiences to her thinking about the meaning of ‘place’ and the traumatic experience of displacement, with special attention given to the way in which it complicates the clinical picture when working with individuals, who have already experienced the traumatic effects of being cast out of the taken-for-granted realms of human contact and love, by early relational failures and by the violations of abuse and torture.
