Immigrants and Refugees - Vamik Volkan

Trauma, Perennial Mourning, Prejudice and Border Psychology

Throughout his extraordinary career, Vamik Volkan has met with and listened to political leaders, refugees, traumatised groups, families, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens throughout the world. He has gathered a wealth of intimate, textured information about our collective engagement with the irrational, with a focus on the dynamics of large groups and the unconscious origins of ethnic identities in conflict. In this book, he links this perspective with his own experience as an immigrant, his detailed psychoanalysis of individual immigrants, and his clinical study of immigrant families, children and adults. Volkan has a profound understanding of loss, mourning, and the ways the trauma embedded in the immigration experience is passed on to the next generation. The book is a vivid and evocative portrait of immigration and the irrational and developmental sources of prejudice. With his understanding of the origins of hatred of the "other", Volkan allows us to see through our clouded vision, opening the possibility of actually learning across difference.
-Edward Shapiro, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Child Study Centre and former Medical Director/CEO, Austen Riggs Centre

Vamik D. Volkan is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, an Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, and Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at the Austen Riggs Centre in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He received the Sigmund Freud Award given by the city of Vienna in collaboration with the World Council of Psychotherapy, an in 2015 he received the Sigourney Award, honouring achievements for the advancement of psychoanalysis.

Format: Paperback