Some notes on the subjective experience of migration and identity in the person of the analyst

Abstract

Unpublished and adjusted version of the paper presented at the 35th Fepal Congress, Rio de Janeiro, October 2024.

Based on psychoanalytic conceptualizations of migration and mourning, we take into account what this type of life experience may also imply for the analyst as a person who at a certain point in his life has had to emigrate; what he loses, what he can keep and what he must build in a new territory enter a common space full of uncertainties, which can only be progressively traversed by the paths of integration and the establishment of psychic bridges between here and there, between the before and the now, between what has been left behind and what can be gained. In this sense, the clinical practice of each analyst will be challenged, perhaps subjected to some necessary modifications in order to continue to take place, but above all it may be full of diverse encounters that will raise effects in the transferential-countertransferential field. The importance of institutional memberships as an identity factor of great relevance for the analyst is also considered, while ques- tioning why these insertions are not always possible even within other psychoanalytic organizations affiliated to IPA, giving rise to experiences of exclusion in many cases.