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Uprooted minds: displacement, trauma and dissociation
Author(s) -
Dowd Amanda
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of analytical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.285
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1468-5922
pISSN - 0021-8774
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5922.12481
Subject(s) - psychic , gestalt psychology , psychology , psychoanalysis , refugee , aesthetics , philosophy , history , medicine , pathology , perception , archaeology , neuroscience , alternative medicine
The author, English born and living in Sydney, Australia, presents an argument for the usefulness of the recognition of the implicit simultaneous links between the following: development of psychic skin and the establishment of the body schema development of a sense of identity relationship with place such that the formulation psychic skin < > mind < > body < > self < > place < > world can be thought of as an organising gestalt or implicit continuum of ‘skin’ experience and process upon which the explicit always depends. This constitutes a taken‐for‐granted ground‐plan of the self‐in‐place . The author follows this with an exploration of the consequences for psychic health of a traumatic rupture of this gestalt for both individual and group. Material from two cases is presented: first, a young woman whose family fled the Balkan wars which splintered the former Yugoslavia; second, the transmission of displacement trauma into the third generation of a family who arrived in Australia after WW II from the former Yugoslavia. For the purposes of this paper I will not make a distinction between migrants/exiles/refugees and instead refer to either displacement or dislocation.