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Why do people migrate from one country to another? What is the difference between an immigrant and an exile? What determines the psychological outcome of immigration? Can one ever mourn the loss of one's country? What are the defensive functions of nostalgia? Are there specific guidelines for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for immigrant patients? How can the therapist disentangle the patient's cultural rationalizations from underlying intrapsychic conflicts?

In this unique book, psychoanalyst and poet Salman Akhtar provides answers to such questions. He notes that migration from one country to another has lasting effects on an individual's identity. Such identity change involves the dimensions of drives and affects, psychic space, temporality, and social affiliation. Dr. Akhtar addresses the immigrant's idealization and devaluation, closeness and distance, hope and nostalgia, transitional area of the mind, superego change, and linguistic transformation. With poignant clinical vignettes, he illustrates the implications of these ideas for the therapeutic process where the therapist, the patient, or both, are immigrants. Immigration and Identity, replete with poetry and personal letters from immigrant colleagues from many nations, conveys its message with irony, wit, laughter, pain, sadness, empathy, and, above all, clinical and human wisdom.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface(p. ix)
• Acknowledgments(p. xv)
• Part I Immigration
• 1 Psychosocial Variables Associated with Immigration(p. 3)
• Factors Affecting the Outcome
• Circumstances of and Reasons for Migration
• Access to Refueling
• Age at Migration
• Pre-immigration Character
• Nature of the Country Left
• Magnitude of Cultural Differences
• Reception by the Host Population
• Experiences of Efficacy in the New Country
• Birth of Children
• Some Unaddressed Realms
• The Role of Bodily Characteristics
• The Impact of Gender
• Marriage and Immigration
• Legal Status
• Homosexuality and Immigration
• Dreams
• The Changed Man-Animal Relationship
• Summary
• Part II Identity
• 2 Development, Phenomenology, and Clinical Relevance of Identity(p. 43)
• Historical Evolution of the Concept
• Developmental Origins of Identity
• The Seeds of Identity before Birth
• Early Childhood
• Later Childhood
• Adolescence
• The Father's Role
• Elaborations of Identity during Adulthood
• Phenomenological Aspects
• Realistic Body Image
• Subjective Self-Sameness
• Consistent Attitudes and Behaviors
• Temporal Continuity
• Authenticity
• Gender
• Ethnicity and Conscience
• Clinical Relevance
• Summary
• 3 Four Tracks in Identity Transformation Following Immigration(p. 75)
• From Love or Hate to Ambivalence
• From Near or Far to Optimal Distance
• From Yesterday or Tomorrow to Today
• From Yours or Mine to Ours
• Some Caveats
• Summary
• Part III Cross-Cultural Treatment
• 4 Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy(p. 109)
• Technical Guidelines
• Maintaining Cultural Neutrality and Avoiding Countertransference Pitfalls
• Judiciously Accommodating the Therapeutic Framework to Cultural Differences
• Adopting a Developmental Stance and Conducting Developmental Work
• Unmasking and Interpreting the Cultural Rationalizations of Intrapsychic Conflicts and Transference Reactions
• Validating Feelings of Dislocation and Facilitating Mourning
• Interpreting Defensive Functions of Nostalgia as well as Defenses against the Emergence of Nostalgia
• Accepting Seemingly Inoptimal Individuation and Involvement of Relatives in Treatment
• Facing the Challenge Posed by the Patient's Polyglottism and Polylingualism
• Summary
• 5 The Immigrant Community and the Immigrant Therapist(p. 139)
• Child and Family Interventions
• Psychoanalytically Informed Advice
• Community Outreach
• The Immigrant Therapist
• Summary
• Glossary(p. 167)
• References(p. 183)
• Credits(p. 209)
• Index(p. 211)
• About the Author(p. 221)

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Salman Akhtar, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College, Lecturer on Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute