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From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 3:31 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Borderlands]: Heras on Beltsiou, 'Immigration in
Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves'
To: <[email protected]>
Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]>
Julia Beltsiou, ed. Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating
Ourselves. Relational Perspectives Book Series. New York Routledge,
2016. 244 pp. $49.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-74182-8.
Reviewed by Ana Inés Heras (Instituto para la Inclusión Social y el
Desarrollo Humano-LICH-CONICET-Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
Published on H-Borderlands (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Maria de los Angeles Picone
In reviewing this book, I will address two questions that bear a
relation to one another. What are the specifics of the semantic
relationship proposed in the title, that is, immigration in
psychoanalysis? Why is this book of interest to scholars working on
issues of borderlands?
_Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves_ is organized in
eight parts, presenting different yet intertwined issues, such as
immigration as psychological opportunity; self-experience and
immigration; otherness; native and foreign languages as related to
psychoanalysis, identity, trauma, melancholia, and mourning; and the
immigrant in older age. Each contributing author addresses the
diversity of topics in a specific manner, in terms of the disciplines
they rest on--besides psychoanalytic theory--and of their own
background. They have experienced a journey across geographies,
countries, immigrant status, and psychoanalytic perspective. In
addition to editor Julia Beltsiou, the authors are Francisco
González, Hazel Ipp, Ghislaine Boulanger, Glenys Lobban, Dino
Koutsolioutsos, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Irene Cairo, Pratyusha
Tummala-Narra, Dori Laub, Lama Zuhair Khouri, and Eva Hoffman, and
they come from such countries as Cuba, South Africa, Greece, India,
Austria, Germany, and Canada. The geographies they traverse in their
chapters include Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Their work
thus bridges several of these geographies and connects with North
America, where most of them develop or have developed their work and
practice. One of the main contributions of this book to H-Borderlands
subscribers is that it informs or reminds us of several different
historical, cultural, and social situations across the world when
people migrate or are forced to migrate.
Each chapter contextualizes historical issues and geopolitical
themes. Borders, in this book, are taken to mean not only the
geopolitical frontier but also the different multifaceted liminal
spaces in between language(s), gendered selves, bi-nationality,
education, and disciplines--and perspectives within disciplines. This
plural notion of "border" is discussed in several chapters, for
example, by Bernstein ("Living between languages") and Koutsolioutsos
("Migration in Search of Sexual Identity").
Each chapter can be read under the light of how the singular
experience may help readers understand immigration displacement and
border trespassing as general themes. The essays remind us of the
importance of understanding the _singular_, that is, the specifics
(of an individual, of an immigrant group, of a collectivity or
culture) of broader processes in time. A poignant example is the
piece by Ipp ("Nell--A Bridge to the Amputated Self"), in which she
analyzes the similarities and differences across South African people
in terms of ethnic and cultural origins, language, political rights,
and skin color. In her analysis of working with someone who came from
her land but was different than her (or so she perceived at the
beginning), she shows that difference does make a difference, and
yet, paradoxically, she also shows how perceiving and working with
difference may bridge over seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.
Several of the chapters present struggles linked to topics related to
people´s displacement, such as colonial domination, diglossia, civil
and human rights, and racism. The authors present contextualized data
to comprehend both the extreme challenges and the unexpected
potential that the processes of dislocation through immigration
bring. Among the challenges are the ones related to discrimination
(by accent, skin color, gender, and sexual orientation), loss of
identity, fear of total assimilation, and anguish of never finding a
home. The challenging issues also provide different sociological and
political categories that are used to classify and understand the
immigrant experience. That is, immigration may act as a general
holder for experiences as different as being exiled, seeking refuge,
escaping and living in disguise, being forced to immigrate (for
example, because you are a child and your family moves), or
voluntarily immigrating. Yet each of these situations is indeed
different, and people who experience them are situated very
differently. Some of these issues are addressed in several chapters,
such as, for example, the one authored by Boulanger ("Seeing Double,
Being Double"), the one by Beltsiou ("Seeking Home in the Foreign"),
and the chapter by Tummala-Narra ("Names, Name Changes, and Identity
in the Context of Migration").
On the other hand, several of the clinical cases portrayed in the
book and the theorization that springs from their analyses also
highlight the potential power of transformation that the experience
of immigration may bring, such as becoming a multilingual and
multicultural subject, understanding difference in ways others may
not (both theoretically and from direct experience), and equipping
oneself with tools otherwise not available, had the change of place
not occurred. The book presents these topics for consideration
throughout the analysis of clinical cases and the related analysis of
the psychoanalyst experience and conceptual work. One such example is
the chapter by González, which addresses displacement as a "fertile
ground for creativity, the strange place where something new can come
into being" (p. 15). González's perspective is that this creativity
and becoming of the new needs to be interpreted as a possibility not
only for the foreign, immigrant patient but also for psychoanalysis,
in as much as it is part of the foundations of the discipline,
already present in Sigmund Freud's work, and a part of the
conceptualization of the experience of being human, which
psychoanalysis addresses when framing the clinical experience as one
where subjects reconstruct their ongoing displacements.
At first glance, this book presents the issue of uniqueness and
forces us to consider whether there can be common themes regarding
psychoanalysis and immigration. In this respect, some authors
conclude that immigration is irremediably connected to melancholia
and the traumatic, while others highlight the potentialities,
openness, and creative forces underpinning any situation of
(dis)location. Several authors also take a stance toward the
importance of not thinking in binary terms (for example, being/not
being native or a foreigner; speaking/not speaking a language;
new/old traditions and cultural ways; melancholia and happiness), and
in different manners, they speak to this issue by providing examples
of continuity, dialectics, and transformation. This framework
(related to hybridity, or third space, in terms of Homi K. Bhabha´s
work, quoted throughout the book in more than one chapter) also helps
conceptualize two other issues, interesting for those working within
the discipline of history and concerned with borderlands: location
and time. Location, already introduced in the paragraphs above,
points to understanding physical space, geographies, traveling,
moving across the globe and the frontiers, arriving, settling, and
unsettling, but in terms of _place_. According to Beltsiou, "place is
a category largely neglected by psychoanalysis, which opts for the
much less saturated, less physical, more mathematically abstract and
universalized idea of space. Immigration brings into sharp relief
what usually remains invisible: place matters" (p. 25). In this
respect, there may be clear connections with historians who work with
the material aspects of human life to understand the issues they
study. The concreteness of life as it is lived, and as people in
their clinical encounters recount it, matters and becomes the
material data from where to sustain a co-investigation with their
analysts when working in therapy. The chapter by Khouri ("The
Immigrant's Neverland") is one such example.
Precisely this issue of the concrete, the materiality of lived
experience, or what González terms "the sensuous texture of
locality," may be one of the reasons why the conjunction "and" is not
used in the title; instead, the preposition _in_ links the two fields
with a semantic relationship of inclusion: immigration _in_
psychoanalysis (p. 27). Throughout the book, then, a central idea is
developed, already located in the title: immigration is a phenomenon
under study in psychoanalysis as it relates to clinical work (that
is, in each singular human being and as each human being _belongs_ to
a community in movement), but it is also a cue to understanding
psychoanalysts who are immigrants. Therefore, one may answer the
question about the commonalities across the uniqueness presented
throughout the book by stating that there are, at least, two common
themes: understanding the immigrant experience by the discipline
(psychoanalysis) and by its practitioners (psychoanalysts) in their
clinical work and in informing public policy, and comprehending that
the _immigrant_ analyst is also constantly locating her/himself in
order to develop clinical and theoretical advancements. It is in this
respect that the subtitle can also be understood: _locating
ourselves_. The book, in the introduction, and then, chapter by
chapter, unravels this _locative_ aspect, which is played out, as
stated above, in terms of geography, historical context, and the
different ways cultures and languages are _situated_ in respect to
one another.
It is also important to note that the book was published in the
Relational Perspectives Book series, born in 1990 and coordinated at
that point by S. A. Mitchell and more recently by Lewis Aron and
Adrienne Harris. To date, the series has published 111 volumes. The
book, chapter by chapter, reinforces the notion that singularity and
uniqueness may be worth exploring in their intersection with a
specific area within psychoanalysis, that of _relational
perspective_. At the beginning of the book, Beltsiou offers an
explanation about the realization she came across during the American
Psychological Association Conference in April 2013: that there was
growing interest in the topic of psychoanalysis and immigration. She
notes that at the conference there were four panels focusing on the
topic of immigration and clinical work. These sessions were well
attended, and, specifically, on the panel that took on the subtitle
of the book, there was an explicit interest in developing
publications on the subject. Taking these facts as an indication
that, indeed, there "is a thirst for understanding the immigrant
subjectivity," Beltsiou set herself the task to coordinate the
writing of the book I am now reviewing (p. 3).
Several of the authors have migrated more than once and thus have
changed their geography, language, and work at different stages of
their professional paths. This type of experience is explored, and
theorized, by Laub ("On Leaving Home and the Flight from Trauma") and
Bernstein ("Living between Languages"). Since the relational
perspective in psychoanalysis acknowledges that the personal
experience of the analyst can contribute to clinical work, Laub and
Bernstein reflect how specifically the immigration experience can or
may contribute to the profession of becoming and being a
psychoanalyst, and of understanding human beings from different
backgrounds. And interestingly too, and building on the notion of
migrating more than once, these and other chapters also acknowledge
that human experience may be considered as a constant traveling,
taking then the concrete situation of immigration as a metaphor for
life, and for professional life/development/career building in
particular (for example, Lobban's chapter, "The Immigrant Analyst,"
or Hoffman's chapter, "Out of Exile").
A final note, and related to the topic addressed at the beginning of
this review: the authors contributing to this book bridge several
different perspectives and disciplines with psychoanalysis. We can
say, metaphorically, that they continuously cross borders. Read in
this key, the book is a useful resource to think through several
disciplines, their contributions, their limitations, and their border
and borderless relations. For example, even though she does not
explicitly resort to linguistic or sociolinguistic theory in her
chapter ("The Place across the Street"), Cairo's conceptual
understanding is grounded in these disciplines, in my reading of her
work. Evidence of this is that to present the cases by which she
chooses to discuss the conceptual categories coming out of
psychoanalysis and social psychology, such as "interpretation,"
"association," or "connection," she needs to rest on such concepts as
"imagery," "pronouns," "prosody," "lexicon," and so forth. The
borders of the discipline, thus, seem much more permeable than one
would imagine, and the contributions to other disciplines can be
_cartographed_ through several of the chapters in this book.
Citation: Ana Inés Heras. Review of Beltsiou, Julia, ed.,
_Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves_. H-Borderlands,
H-Net Reviews. June, 2021.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55286
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
--
Best regards,
Andrew Stewart
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