“We Migrants”
The migrants’ story, a “hystory” that needs to be told.
The myth of vanishing cultures preceded the forced relocation of native American tribes in the US, in the early 19th century, which was known as the Trail of Tears. The policy of many governments was, and still is, focused on limiting, even erasing diversity in the population. In Europe, and elsewhere, history shows repetitive attempts of preserving a dominant white population. Currently, in the face of declining populations, countries openly stimulate young people to have more children to increase their own kind, rather than rely on immigration. Today in predominant white societies we see a rising call for closing borders to “foreigners”, “refugees”, “migrants” in relation to differences such as language, colour, ethnicity, religion.
Why is the question of migration now at the top of the political agenda in many European countries and even in the US, once known as “the melting pot”? What made Europeans think they were more cultivated, more advanced, and therefore entitled to enslave, exclude, exile, dislocate and displace others? Barbarian methods nearly led to the extinction of cultures.
As if a certain “sameness in whiteness” gave some the right to dominate others. In some cases, populations were erased from the Earth, young women made infertile, children stolen and separated from their homes and cultural heritage, all to turn them into a certain “whiteness”, often connected to the Christian faith. Think of the Aboriginal people in Australia, the Inuit in Canada and Alaska, children of North, South and Mid America, not to mention Africa and Native Americans. The list is long, and we find more examples going back in time. Today something of the same is happening again, it never stopped.
Having colonised much of the world, Europe finds itself confronted with a growing wave of “de-colonisation”. The paradoxical movements of “de-” or “re-migration” and “de-colonisation” seem to be attempts to undo something in the present and from the past as well. A “return” in both directions takes place.
Only the birds
Only the birds are still moving, migrating freely over the entire planet, not hindered by walls, borders, racial inferiority/superiority. They come and go when needed, when the climate changes, when food is scarce. Only humans are not allowed to do so freely anymore. They can no longer migrate when their lives are threatened by conflict, when climate changes, when hunger forces one to leave one place to find a better one. The nomadic migration is fenced in. One is even pushed back behind the fences, due to the policy of re-migration. This crusade against nomads, migrants, refugees, “foreigners” is rising globally. Except in the case where immigrant workers are required to compensate for aging and declining populations.
Hannah Arendt describes in her essay “We Refugees” how keen the Jews were to adapt, desperately trying to fit in any culture in search for a “home”. Most of continental Europe connived with the Germans to outlaw the Jewish people: “The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted”.2
Not just the Jews, other groups as well were targeted. These waves of wars, excluding, exterminating, enslaving, displacing groups and individuals alike, is called by Sigmund Freud “human barbarism”.
Is migration a journey within ourselves?
Humans constantly create walls, barriers and laws to bring in or to keep out other human beings. Those who trespass these human-made barriers are considered outlaws, without rights, devoid of citizenship, prevented from living a more bearable life in his/her own singular manner. Being a migrant, a refugee or asylum seeker may be applicable to anybody, any analysand coming for analysis. Psychoanalysis may offer a refuge for a while from the discontents of society. Whether these be family, war, famine, religion, a personal desire, a wanting to get away to find a new perspective. After an analysis, or even one session, one steps back into the common reality from which there is no real escape, one needs to find a way to deal with life. Language can come to rescue as a tool.
The pain of existence
Shakespeare knew of the human condition. We can read in Hamlet how important language is, or to tell one’s own story:
Hamlet to Horatio: Had I but time, O, I could tell you. But let it be Horatio, I am dead, thou livest, report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied. … O good Horatio, what a wounded name. Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile; and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. (March afar off, and shot within) What warlike noise is this?
Osric: Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland to the ambassadors of England gives this warlike volley.
Hamlet: I cannot live to hear the news from England…
Hamlet dies.3
It is a scenario applicable to every subject for each in their own singular way. At the end of his life, Hamlet is sovereign for the briefest of moments before he must give way to the young Fortinbras. Hamlet cannot know the fate of his nation, and neither can he tell his own story, the telling of which he must trust Horatio. Hamlet’s demand that one’s story be told, however, is shared by refugees and migrants who likewise have to depart the scene of their nation’s destiny, leaving it to others to tell their stories. Books like The displaced and No friend but the mountains, were written by refugees, the latter smuggled out of a detention camp by means of a mobile phone.4 Many drown in the sea who cannot tell their stories and must leave it to others, to writers, journalists, doctors, even forensic pathologists to tell of the remnants of their existence. As the world turns perpetually through wars, natural and man-made disasters, one loves and dies wanting to tell one’s story or have it told by others.
To live becomes a choice of being “alive”
For each of us comes into the world and looks for refuge from the Real of the world, to meet the “not-all” world we inhabit, dealing with impossibilities and the obstacles on the road. We can find moments of refuge - in analysis, in illness, in addictions, in sanctuary cities, fleeing war or brutal regimes, but we will have to face this return to the common reality. Or as Freud put it: “In psychoanalysis, alas everything is different”,5 different than the common reality.
Refugees and migrants move away from a situation, leave language and the familiar behind, which is not so different from what happens in analysis. To undertake an analysis is to go through hell, says Jacques Lacan. To be exiled or to leave what is familiar is not about adaptation, but to find a way to deal with the impossible, to accept limitations. Migration is somehow taking risks, leaving what one knows and moving towards an unknown.
Giving back dignity
In the text “British psychiatry and the war”,6 Lacan investigates the effect of psychoanalysis in the treatment of soldiers. His observation leads him to say that it could be “to reawaken in them the feeling of their dignity”, no more, no less. Lacan was intrigued by the effects the analytical approach by Bion had on the depressed soldiers and their difficulties readjusting to civilian life.
This idea stayed with me in my own work with refugees. While no one has control over the matters of the world, the wars, the disasters and the unpredictable consequences of everchanging political decisions, it is possible that an analytic intervention enables subjects to recover their dignity. By speaking, one creates a distance between what one was and what one becomes. One loses, but one can also find, or re-find a more dignified existence: migrants, refugees and analysands alike. In “The obscure causes of racism”, Jacques-Alain Miller emphasizes on the notion of “extimacy”, a Lacanian invention, this being like a foreign body, even to oneself:
Racism targets the enjoyment of the Other, which is so alien to me. But beyond that, it is a hatred of my own enjoyment, which is so external to me… Being an immigrant is the status of the subject itself in psychoanalysis. The subject as such, defined by its place in the Other, is an immigrant.7
The work with immigrants, refugees and the exiled demonstrates this reality in the extreme. Alienation in language is intensified when the demands of assimilation require the prohibition of speaking one’s mother tongue. I have found that to speak in one’s own language is helpful to re-find one’s voice. Many countries insist that migrants speak solely the language of their hosts. If people do not accept it, they face the threat of repatriation or the rising voices in favour of “remigration”, which means sending people back from where they came, or even deporting them to a foreign place. The brutality of reinforcing these measures is an example of what Freud, exiled in London in 1938, describes to Stefan Zweig as barbarity. Zweig wrote in his book The World of Yesterday: “A man used to have only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport too, or he won’t be treated as a man”.8
As a human being, Freud was deeply distressed by that terrible outbreak of bestiality, such as World War One and Two, but as a thinker he was not at all surprised. Freud, Lacan and Miller advise all who receive and work with humans who are confronting personal suffering not to disconnect from the time in which we live.
No war without a discourse….
On the cover of “La psychanalyse à l’épreuve de la guerre” (“Psychoanalysis put to the test of war”) Marie-Hélène Brousse writes:
A conclusion is necessary: War is one of the dominant forms of interhuman social bond. Its “barbarism” is civilization itself. Faced with this reality, peace appears like delusion or wishful thinking. War is not a natural phenomenon, it is not a simple manifestation of aggressiveness, because it always involves a logic of discourse; no war without discourse, no war without master signifiers, whether religious, moral, national, ethnic, or technical... Always traumatic, the experience of war leaves an indelible real mark on the subjects who are confronted with it. But this trauma is specific each time and for each person.9
Only the displaced
Lacan refers to “the displaced/deportees” in “Joyce the symptom”:10 “Only the displaced/deportees write history”. As we read in Hamlet, only the displaced demand that their story be told. Lacan’s insight, drawn from literature, has not dated.
Lacanian psychoanalysis invites us to welcome the “foreigner in us”, and the foreigners coming to us, rather than send them back, or lock them up, or let them to die in the sea, in the desert, or in jail. The analytical discourse may be a rare chance for the “foreigner”, the “migrant” within us, and those outside of us to have one’s hystory told!
1 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”, Menorah 31 (January 1943), 69-77.
2 Ibid.
3 William Shakespeare, “Hamlet” 5.2, 278-82. The Norton Shakespeare. London: WW Norton, 1997, 1754-55.
4 Viet Thanh Nguyen (ed), The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. London: Abrams Press, 2018, and Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains: The True Story of an Illegally Imprisoned Refugee trans. Omid Tofighian. London: Picador, 2019.
5 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE Vol. XV.
6 Jacques Lacan, “British Psychiatry and War” in The Real and the Social Bond, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 33, The London Society of the New Lacanian School, 2019, 11-58, 30.
7 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Being an immigrant is the status of the subject itself in psychoanalysis. The subject as such, defined by its place in the Other, is an immigrant”, “Extimate Enemies” in The Lacanian Review 03. Paris: The New Lacanian School, 2017, 30-42,31.
8 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday. London: Pushkin Press, 2024.
9 Marie-Hélène Brousse, Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de la guerre. Paris: Berg International, 2015, 3.
10 Jacques Lacan, “Joyce the Symptom” in The Lacanian Review 05. Paris: The New Lacanian School, 2018, 13-18, 16-17.