Healing rituals with families in exile *

This paper describes work with families who have been subjected to torture and atrocity and forced into political exile. Exile is described as a state of limbo which may be resolved by involving families in rituals which reconnect them to communal life. Therapeutic dilemmas when working with families affected by torture and atrocity are discussed. The culture of refugee families is a resource which can be used to enable them to integrate experiences of atrocity and adapt to life in exile. Therapeutic strategies are discussed through case histories.     

Exilic Effects of Illness and Pain in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward: How Sharpening the Moral Imagination Can Facilitate Repatriation

This essay uses Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward to explore the exilic effects of illness and pain. The novel is uniquely suited for such an analysis given the theme of exile that predominates both in the narrative and in the composition of multiple characters within that narrative. I argue that illness, and in particular pain, is a liminal state, an existential hinterlands. The ethical approach to literature and medicine may suggest, as a response to these exilic effects, the need to cultivate connection and empathy by sharpening the moral imagination. If pain and illness exile the sufferer, the imperative to reach out takes on ethical content.     

Exile and return: from phenomenology to naturalism (and back again)

Abstract

Naturalism in twentieth century philosophy is founded on the rejection of ‘first philosophy’, as can be seen in Quine’s rejection of what he calls ‘cosmic exile’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology falls within the scope of what naturalism rejects, but I argue that the opposition between phenomenology and naturalism is less straightforward than it appears. This is so not because transcendental phenomenology does not involve a problematic form of exile, but because naturalism, in its recoil from transcendental philosophy, creates a new form of exile, what I call in the paper ‘exile from within’. These different forms of exile are the result of shared epistemological aspirations, which, if set aside, leave open the possibility of phenomenology without exile. In the conclusion of the paper, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty as an example of what phenomenology without epistemology might look like.     

Hipparchia the Cynic: Feminist Rhetoric and the Ethics of Embodiment

Hipparchia's use of exile as an ethical and rhetorical space from which to critique convention is the point of departure for an examination of the ethics of using exile as a rhetorically effective position for feminist theorizing. To address the ethical problems involved in using exile as a rhetorical space, I argue for a reading of exile as both a rhetorical and embodied space that can maintain an ethical anchor for feminist rhetorical and political practice.     

Psychoanalysis Traumatized: The Legacy of the Holocaust

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. It was founded and flourished in central European centers that would be destroyed by the Nazis. A core group of refugees who lived through persecution and exile were instrumental in rebuilding their movement on alien shores. They had no opportunity to mourn the loss of their culture or their leader, Freud, whose death was overshadowed by the cataclysmic upheaval around them. Though its trauma has been dissociated, it is represented in psychoanalytic ideas and enacted in institutions within the context of delayed or incomplete mourning. For example, authoritarianism in psychoanalytic institutions will be explored as a reliving of the trauma of both fascism and exile, and not merely typical group psychology. Further evidence of the impact of dissociated trauma includes the astonishing scotoma for actual events in treatment of Holocaust survivors; the extreme privileging of infantile fantasy over reality, and attention to childhood neurosis at the expense of adult catastrophic events.     

The Potential of Paradox in States of Exile: Discussion of “States of Exile and Marginalization”

This commentary paper engages with Gillian Straker’s “States of Exile and Marginalization,” (this issue) in which she analyzes Tracey Moffatt’s film Night Cries through a Lacanian register. In addition, it surfaces certain aspects of Moffatt’s interpretation of her social world through the representational medium of her film. Tracing Straker’s themes of marginality and continued trauma as exilic consequences of colonization and coloniality, it also suggests that there are generative possibilities in the multiple states of exile that occur under such conditions, where the unknowability and irresolvability of trauma and its many associated states of exile are precisely what paradoxically allow for the emergence of productive alternatives to trauma repetition.     

Conflict and Compromise in International Calvinism: Ysbrand Trabius Balck's Pastoral Mediations in Exile and Beyond

Abstract

The life of frequent banishment and exile of the respected minister, Ysbrand Trabius Balck (c.1530-c.1600), offers an opportunity to see a refugee pastor in action and to witness the practical concerns that faced the Reformed Church, both while ‘under the cross’ and after establishment. Balck's early Reformed ministerial post was in Antwerp, which he left for exile to Emden, Germany, shortly after the outbreak of iconoclasm in the Netherlands. After Emden, he left for England, where he served as pastor in four congregations of Dutch refugees before returning to Antwerp ten years later. Subsequent turbulence caused additional periods of exile from Antwerp, including stints in Leiden, Poland, and Friesland. Balck's experience in international refugee networks led him to be called to serve as a mediator in congregational conflicts; here his practical experiences kept him aware of the local situations that he needed to consider in any conflict resolutions. This article investigates Balck's practical role as negotiator and mediator in three controversies involving charity and church discipline: first and foremost during his brief Emden exile, which has been overlooked by scholars, and two more widely known episodes in Leiden. Such an investigation underscores the complicated reality of international Calvinism, as the exile experience and his pastoral obligations sharpened Balck's firm doctrinal convictions while at the same time causing him to emphasize accommodation and striving to find ways to live together despite conflict.     

On Society's Crimes Against Itself

Because the effects of crimes committed by society against the individual impact on the individual's psychic life, psychoanalysis offers a unique means of reflecting the effects of these crimes to society. Furthermore, psychoanalysis is in the position to contribute to society's understanding of the causes as well as the effects of these crimes for both victims and perpetrators. This article introduces a view of some of the intrapsychic consequences of being a refugee, an exile, a victim of persecution and of political torture and is intended to serve as an introduction to the studies reported in this volume.     

A Living Life, A Living Death: Bessie Head��s Writing as a Survival Strategy

This paper explores Bessie Head's writing as a survival strategy through which she transformed her lived experience into imaginative literature, giving meaning and purpose to a life under permanent threat from the dominant group first in South Africa and later in Botswana. This threat included the destructive effect of the many fixed labels imposed upon her including: a 'Coloured' woman, the daughter of a woman designated mad, an exile, a psychotic, a tragic black woman, and a Third World woman writer. Her endeavours to avoid and defeat such limited, static definitions produced work characterised by contradiction and paradox, through which she asserted her right to survive and determined, like Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather, to establish 'a living life' in place of the 'living death that a man could be born into' (Head 1989, 136). Through a combination of Head's personal letters and papers and her published work, it can be seen how her particular preoccupations and experiences including her life in exile, her beliefs about her origins, her relationship to her absent mother, her distress, her madness and her need for love and for work were transformed into writing which expresses not only the destructive circumstances of her life but also its life-affirming aspects. Her writing was also a means by which she could create identities to express the dangers she encountered from the all-pervasive power structures which influenced her life and her sense of self, as well as ways to transcend them, enabling her to say in the last years of her life 'I am no failure' (20.2.1986 KMM BHP).     

Of exile and Halakhah: Fourteenth-century Spanish Halakhic literature and the works of the French exiles Aaron ha-Kohen and Jeruham b. Meshulam

This article discusses the halakhic works of two authors who shared the experience of exile and displacement. Both authors, R. Aaron ha-Kohen of Lunel and R. Jeruham b. Meshulam, wrote halakhic compendia after leaving their homes in Southern France and settling in Spanish territory after the expulsion of 1306. The article suggests that there is a connection between a scholar's experience of being displaced and his desire to devote his time to assembling, restructuring and giving order to the law. R. Aaron ha-Kohen authored a work that was a collection of opinions, a compilation to consult regularly, one that can best be described as a portable library for the wanderer and the homebound person alike. Aaron in his introduction explicitly links his motivation for composing such a work to his personal experience of exile. R. Jeruham b. Meshulam composed a handbook or guide for the practicing judge of Castile. His primary motivation was to correct a situation he found in his new home – the lack of qualified judges in issuing legal decisions. Jeruham, as well, describes at length his exile experience in his introduction and indicates that his motivation to write such a work emerges from it. One can suggest that behind the émigré's diligence in ordering the law lay an attempt to recapture a lost world and to recreate on paper or parchment what was forever lost.     

Psychotherapy with children in refugee families who have survived torture: Containment and understanding of repetitive behaviour and play

Children of refugee families who have survived torture often have emotional, psychosomatic and behavioural problems as well as problems with learning. In order to understand the difficulties of these children, we have to recognize the complicated interaction of cumulative traumatic strain and recurring exposure to shocking violence. The traumatic experiences of the child in the country of origin take place in the broader context of chronic danger and persecution, often to be followed in the country of exile both by recurrent family strain and social estrangement. In the transference this complicated mixture of repeated trauma and chronic strain may show as a pervasive tendency to retreat to defensive survival strategies combined with continual repetition of more specific traces of the impact of the trauma on the individual. This paper focuses on how the enacted survival strategies can be contained and understood in the transference. In due course the compulsive repetition can be given meaning as a precondition for better integration through symbolic thought and self-understanding.     

Political exile and the construction of identity: A life stories approach

This paper centres its attention on the impact political exile—a result of the 1973 military coup in Chile—had on the life of exiles, particularly on their identity, based on life stories. It examines the life experiences of four groups of exiles living in Belgium following two criteria: (1) whether they remained in the host country or returned to Chile once the political conditions permitted them to do so, and (2) whether they belonged to the first generation (the exiles themselves) or the second generation (the children of exiles). The results are organized into three main categories of analysis: the places of exile, that is the symbolic sites, the different meanings exile has acquired in the personal histories of the interviewees, showing that the main place is where the individual had to test him/herself, the place they seem to have been sent forever; the return, that is the role the prohibition to come back played and still plays today, which has been characterized as a myth, a possibility and an option; and, finally, the narration of exile, which examines special features of the narration of the exile experience viewed retrospectively and in relation to whether the events are still in vigour, thus giving birth to stories about exile after the exile. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Immigrant, the Exile, and the Experience of Nostalgia

Resulting from a retrospective idealization of lost objects, nostalgia helps the immigrant defend against the aggression resulting from current frustrations. This experience is missing in the exile whose deeply traumatizing departure from his land of origin spoils whatever good memories of that land might exist within him. Retrospective idealization is not possible and the ego is deprived of the nostalgic defense. The psychoanalyst dealing with the immigrant's nostalgia must offer psychic space for its development while keeping an eye upon the hidden transference allusions in the nostalgic pleasure as well as upon its screen functions vis-à-vis aggression in the here and now. Psychoanalytic work with the exile requires a different slant. Empathy with how bad the land of origin was must precede for a long while before defenses against the emergence of nostalgia can be analyzed.     

Introduction

In this introduction, the highlights of three papers addressing the questions of immigration, traumatic migration and exile are presented. The papers give clinical details of the work with persons inflight from dangerous and potentially fatal homeland situations, offer theoretical guidelines to thinking about the different implications of trauma upon refugees and migrating persons and families and also consider the particular demands on migration and exile in communities and families within the United States.     

Social Trauma,Nostalgia and Mourning in the Immigration Experience

Immigration and exile can qualify as social traumas. The individual is deprived of a holding, secure environment in which to continue their life. The process of mourning is a necessary step to connect with “going on being.” Another psychic experience in migration is nostalgia; it helps the immigrant defend against the aggression resulting from current frustrations. The feeling of nostalgia can also be used to protect the ego from inadequacy. The complex components of nostalgia come from positive ones such as joy and gratitude connected with sadness about the associated loss of security, familiarity, and historical continuity. At other times, nostalgia cannot evolve, particularly in forced migration or exile. In this case, the individual enters a depressed state with accompanying feelings of self-pity, resentment, envy, and guilt, which prevents the mourning process from developing. To deal with these painful experiences, the person resorts to linking objects or linking phenomena that help them continue having contact with the past, while adjusting to their new environment.

     

SELF-MAKING IN EXILE: MORAL EMPLACEMENT BY SYRIAN REFUGEE WOMEN IN JORDAN

This article brings an anthropology of ethics to bear on a case of forced migration and displacement among Syrian refugee women in Jordan. The case reveals how projects of Islamic self-making in displacement become “emplacement” processes within the new state-mediated context. Syrian women in Jordan engage in Islamic self-making as part of their wider emplacement practices in two primary ways: first, operating more publicly in the material world through Islamically-inspired actions and rituals than in Syria. Second, utilizing narratives of Islamic histories to establish dignity in conditions of precarity in exile. Using two focus groups in urban Jordan and participant observation in two religion classes in a Syrian refugee camp, this article focuses on these practices of Islamic self-making that serve an important role in the projects of moral emplacement for Syrian women in the Jordanian context.     

States of Exile and Marginalization

The experience of marginality is visceral. The artist Tracey Moffatt, Australia’s representative at the 2017 Vienna biennale, understands this exquisitely. Her work depicts marginality and states of exile powerfully and compels us to respond. In speaking to the traumatic images in her work I am aware that words are inadequate. The Lacanian Real of trauma is always an excess, the beyond of words. This is recognized by Moffatt in her largely wordless work, which nevertheless speaks to many states of exile engendered by geographical isolation, cultural domination and hybridity, powerlessness, and dependence, as well as alienated states produced by everyday misattunements.     

Cross-ethnic networks, self-reception system, and functional integration of refugees from the former Yugoslavia in Rome

The character of the immigrant policy context in Italy has caused refugees from the former Yugoslavia in Rome to organize themselves spontaneously and to create a self-reception system that facilitates their functional integration. The Italian policy context allows refugees to approach their situation in exile in an active way because it does not offer them a dependent role. Emphasizing the importance of providing refugees with a framework for an active reconstruction of life, however, should not be understood as an apologia for the absence of strategy for integration as well as legal, financial, and institutional means to facilitate this process.     

BOOK REVIEWS

The storming of the Golden Temple complex in 1984 is central to the imagination of both a Sikh ‘nation’ and a specifically Sikh ‘diaspora’. Both ‘derivative discourses’ construct Sikhs as ‘victims’ of a ghallughara which forced them into a physical or emotional exile from India. Translated as ‘genocide’, the term ghallughara resonates deeply with earlier pogroms in Sikh history, and is memorialized through the image of the desecrated Akal Takht. Mediated through Information and Communications Technologies, this on-line lieux de mémoire provides testimony to the attempt by the ‘secular’ Indian state to violently wrench the temporal from the spiritual dimensions of Sikh sovereignty as embodied in the Khalsa, thus leaving Sikhs ‘mute and absolutely alone’ in a world of nation-states. In contrast to the nationalist imaginary, it is suggested that Sikh claims to sovereignty should be grounded not in territorial claims to an imagined homeland of Khalistan, but in a reconceptualization of the Khalsa as a distinct de-territorialized religio-political community, one better able to articulate the universal values of the Gurus in an increasingly ‘post-western’ world.