Immigrant Analysts and the Search for an Emotional Home

Papers on the subject of the immigrant analyst seem to have floated into my awareness in recent weeks. There was a chapter by Kirloff about the consequences for psychoanalysis in the UK from the immigrant analysts who arrived there fleeing from the Third Reich. A recent issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues features papers by two very different analysts: Glenys Lobban - a white South African practising in New York and Dori Laub - a Holocaust survivor and trauma specialist, who has practised both in Israel and the USA. Now the International Association of Self-Psychology has sent out notices for their conference to be held in October this year in Jerusalem and lo-and-behold, the title is: "Where Do We Feel At Home?: Self Psychological Perspectives of Belonging and Not Belonging".

It seems the time has come for me to reflect on my own immigrant experience as a therapist, both in the UK and then when I returned to South Africa (which was both a homecoming and an immigration after 32 years away). Glenys Lobban uses the term "double consciousness" coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, to describe her experience of the multiple selves the immigrant has to negotiate in her new country. Among them was the position of both simultaneously being inside her own experience of foreignness and seeing herself and her foreignness through the eyes of someone living in her new host country - “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”.   The keyword here is "always". Just in order to survive, an immigrant does need at times to perceive  themselves and their culture as others see them. (I would call this an "assimilating self"). But to be always having to do this and for it to be through the negative lens of racism - this is what I think was meant by "double consciousness".
I doubt there is a single oppression in which the individual escapes internalising the prejudiced or stereotyping viewpoints of the general society in this fracturing way. It is in the nature of the traumatizing aspects of oppression itself that we internalize what's in the mind of the oppressor. Interestingly, a young relative of mine who is being trained for global entrepreneurship at a prestigious business school in France is expected to foster a dual consciousness. One of the first questions he was asked to write about was whether he had ever experienced culture-shock, and how would he describe his culture to someone from the outside. The difference here from Lobban's experience is the multiculturalism of the institution - no one culture is valorized over another.

In reality, one may be pretty good at picking up negative perceptions but may not accurately perceive the variety of perspectives that are held by host country individuals and it may take years to develop a nuanced picture of the new country. Nevertheless, an analyst/therapist is in a very privileged position in this regard. Every client to some extent introduces us to a new culture and they teach us the mores and norms, beliefs and values therefrom in the hope that we will eventually understand where they are coming from. One of our jobs in the complicated business of co-constructing a meaningful therapeutic relationship is to become social anthropologists and historians for our clients and in the process of doing so, we become the recipients of much treasured information. Lobban saw her "double consciousness" as tripping her up sometimes with her clients. She feels it is important to integrate all her selves and be able to play them like a pack of cards.

I had a somewhat different experience. I found myself in contexts in London where white South Africans represented a pariah country and although I never denied my origins, never changed my accent much beyond the few years I lived in the USA (where one almost had to in order to be understood), I think I dissociated a lot of my white South African experience, so that I had the feeling of having a divided brain. I found it hard to remember friendship networks or the geography of Cape Town while living in London, and this was equally the case for my London life when I made visits home. On the other hand I had another identity - that of an Ashkenazi Jew and I seemed to know when to hide it (in looking for jobs in the early years) and when to draw on it in order to find common ground with British and New York Jews, with European experience and especially with the culture of psychoanalysis, which in itself felt a bit like my family - intergenerational conflicts and splits, first-generation children rebelling against immigrant parents - in many ways, the story of all migrating families. (Good examples can be found in "Bread Givers" - a fictionalized memoir by Anzia Yezierska who grew up in the early1900's among the Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan  or "The Boy with the Topknot - A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton" by Sathnam Sanghera about growing up in the Sikh community in Britain). I am certainly not alone in any of this. Psychoanalytic history is full of refugee analysts who dissociated what they had left behind and many Jews in the generation before mine, who fled the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe and later the Nazis, in searching for emotional homes, found them in Marxism, Zionism and also psychoanalysis.

Crocuses

There have also been explorations of the colonized mind which some psychoanalysts have theorized and written about - notably Frantz Fanon. An English-speaking education in apartheid South Africa in the 1950's, was guaranteed to value British and especially colonial culture, and make it easy to denigrate what seemed to represent the South African culture in which I grew up. I remember my first early spring in London, seeing purple, yellow and white flowers springing up out of the grass and being able to name them as crocuses although I had never seen one before. I just knew it from all the vivid descriptions I had read about spring in England in the storybooks of my youth. I had never read anything which featured our extraordinary Western Cape spring and my immigrant parents were too caught up in their memories of the springtime beauty of Lithuania to notice that the countryside was worth exploring at that time of the year. I only discovered what it was like when I returned to live here. Knowing and valuing what was British and being ignorant of and denigrating what was South African must've played a large role in the dissociating of my experience.

Springtime in Clanwillian, Western Cape

 So it was surprising to discover that my South African accent of which I was often ashamed, gave me advantages. It made it much easier for working class people to seek me out for therapy. In a society where your accent places you inexorably into class and region, a person who grows up working class may find it hard to have a middle-class therapist and this seemed to be the case for some people. My accent did not define me in class terms.The generation of post-war working class children who had entered grammar schools, thereby in a sense becoming "middle-class" or, if you like, "immigrants" from their working class roots, began to have problems of identity among other issues, and to seek therapy at about the time I started practising in the 1970's. I won't expand on this but I learnt a lot about British society from these clients.

The other paper in the same issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues by Dori Laub had surprising resonances for me and seems to point towards the integration I myself sought by coming home.
"For an analyst to do his work, he must reside in his own emotional home.........a space where an inner truth can be safeguarded and protected, as well as shared with others who are receptive to it. Forced assimilation is inimitable to the preservation of such internal protected space,...Whether it is self-imposed or an outcome of societal pressure, vast portions of the self are disavowed and thus lost to introspection and to associative work..........It is therefore preferable for the psychoanalyst to remain an immigrant who keeps both cultural perspectives - the one stemming from his tradition and background, and the other acquired in his new home, side by side and in dialogue with each other."

Dori Laub doesn't think this is an easy task, as indeed my own experience attests. He talks about countries and language - some more like home than others - and then comes up with an extraordinary couple of sentences: What I find most of all as homecoming, however, is sharing and reflecting about a horrendous past and uncovering the ways in which it continues to reverberate in the present. This is for me very passionate, emotional, and intellectual work in which I feel very much at home. 
I read this with a gasp of recognition. Although I am not a Holocaust survivor, I feel these words speak to me and of me.