Migrant families

Fatherhood and Parentage: Is Migration a Destiny?

Abstract

This article describes the migratory process in its intrapsychic, intersubjective and sociocultural aspects. The place of the stranger is par excellence that which every migrant has to accept to occupy, configuring a place of difference, otherness and radical negativity. We quote the Freudian Unheimlich to think of this place of stran- ger, being threatening and familiar at the same time. All migration requires migrants to develop a great psychic plasticity because they will have to undergo constant changes and thus build their own interculturality. The migrant family develops certain characteristics of its own, as it goes through the process of adaptation to the host country. We define the concept of parentship and filiation, in a broad reciprocal relationship. We note in the migrating family, a reversal of places between generations caused by the changes that all migration im- poses on the people who go through this process. The children of migrant families, having mastered the new language before their parents, guide them in their habits and customs and this creates great changes in the family.